Are Those Bread Bags in Your Boots?

A fact of life when you’re poor and you’re still growing, is that you get only one pair of winter boots per year, if you’re lucky. And the type you get are “play” boots for the snow, not “dressy” boots. So the few times you dress up to go out, like at Christmas, you have to wear your short snow boots with a dress, which is not much of a fashion statement, but what could we do?
Another consequence of the “one pair of boots” rule was that if they got a hole in them, which they usually did, we’d have to wear a bread bag over our socks to waterproof them. I remember being very careful when I was pulling my boots off or on in the cloakroom at school, so the bag wouldn’t show. I would either go into the cloakroom first or wait to be the last one out, so no one would see them. Those were some of the times I felt our poverty. Now I appreciate that everyone in our family can buy new boots every winter, if needed, with warm boots and dressy boots, too.