Do You Remember When You Sent Your Film Through The Mail To Be Developed?

Our youth today has no idea how lucky they are to be able to take pictures on their phones and share them on social media immediately.  When I was young we had to send our film through the mail to be developed.  Do you remember the photo mailer in the picture above?  Yes, Holiday Gas Station use to deal with developing film!

I am trying to simplify my home and was going through a box full of photo negatives when I found an old Holiday photo mailer.  Isn't the old Holiday logo cool?  Remember when they use to have that as their gas station sign?

When we used the mailers, we sometimes went months before seeing photos we had taken and prayed that they turned out.  We would shoot a few pictures here and a few pictures there, but couldn't take the film out to be developed until we had shot all that was available.  We'd then stop at Holiday and get the mailer, put our return address on it and send it off, not knowing if we'd ever see the pictures or not.  I laughed when I saw the "How To Order" form and it says to wrap your currency in paper and don't send your Holiday Credit Card with your order!

Then time crawled.  I would check the mailbox every day after about a week.  It was totally frustrating, except that our rural mail carrier would always have a stick of gum for me if I met him at the mailbox.  Then, one day I would open the mailbox and see the familiar yellow envelop mixed in with our other mail.  I would rip it open and scan through the photos and inevitably there would be photos with red eyes, cut off heads, and some photos just came black.  We use to joke that it was the town of Wrenshall at night.  Needless to say, it was a waste of money most of the time.  But, finding the photo mailers evoked memories and I was wondering if you remember using them too.