Drinking boxes!

It's like a band of A.C. Slaters.

If there's one thing that was a mainstay of my youth, it would be drinking boxes.  Almost every school lunch for years had one of these sugar water spectaculars included with it.  It actually got to the point where I remember there being a bit of snobbery toward people that DIDN'T have a Kool-Aid Kooler at lunch.



What really weirds me out about this whole thing is that Kool-Aid Koolers seemed to disappear overnight.  They've come back somewhat with Kool-Aid Jammers (in Capri Sun ripoff packaging), but it's still weird how fast that stuff went out.

McCain drinking boxes were probably the second-most popular at the time.  They still have juices packed in similar packaging, but only the mainstays like orange and apple.  Back in the day, there was a RASPBERRY juice.  I'm a huge raspberry fiend, so this was just the ultimate.  There was also one called "Grape Nectar" that tasted more like the industrial water runoff from the making of grape juice itself.  The only good thing to ever come out of Grape Nectar was the time a friend of mine squirted his box of it at a wasp nest behind the school.



Capri Sun was exciting for one reason: we didn't have it in Eastern Canada.  It was like a myth, especially when we only had boxes and the idea of a foil bag full of sugary fruit-tinged water seemed foreign and almost crazy.  Now it's just par-for-the-course boredom because we're old and jaded.  Neat.