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For more than 100 years, cigar boxes have been Canada's storage container. Sturdy, always at hand, not-too-big, not-too-small, built-in cover—cigar boxes have been used to hold everything from faucet parts, marbles, stamps, and medicines, to fishing lures, checkers, and spools of embroidery thread.  But the oldest cigar boxes store something else for us: bits and pieces of our past. Put these together, and a picture emerges of Canada when it was young. We learn from cigar boxes something of what Canadians were thinking, who was important in their lives, what their sense of humour might have been like, and what it meant for them to be Canadians.
Old cigar boxes may seem unlikely relics. But like ancient Roman coins or the shards of Mesopotamian pots, they represent part of the world that made them. They offer us a window on that world, if only we know how to see it. |
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