Box Toppers U.K. style

The Fuzz and the Knitwear

When I was a lad in the 1950s, cereal companies ran promotions for their younger cereal crunchers by asking them to send in one or two tops from cereal boxes, along with  25¢ for handling and postage, and voila, you would soon receive plastic frogmen to play with in the tub, or a miniature submarine that "fired" a torpedo through the bath water. These were offerings you couldn't pass up. At least not if you were an eight-year-old boy.

Well, that was one kind of box top offering. In England there is another kind of box topper, namely knitting figurines to fit on top of the mail boxes that are spread all over the United Kingdom. Apparently there are 115,500 mail boxes found in the country, and any number of them have these knitted toppers placed on them by the local women who knit.

The toppers remain there for a only brief period because it seems people steal the elaborate knitwear nearly as quickly as someone plops a topper on the top of a mailbox. 

There is an inimitable A-Hed piece in today's WSJ that makes use of an untold number of puns (I gave up trying to count them) to deliver the story as it has been "unraveling" across the United Kingdom.

And while the print edition shows us two of these mail box toppers in color, the online edition of the paper outdoes itself by displaying many more of the inventive, colorful creatures and objects that people keep placing on top on their local mail box tops, almost as fast as they are whisked away by the mail box topper knitwear bandits.

One confusing part of the story is that the pastime of decorating your local mail box is said to have "started in 2005, when Magda Sayeg knitted a cover for the front handle of her clothing boutique in Houston." Houston, Texas? Emphatically yes. I certainly missed that story.

The practice is called "yarn bombing" when everyday objects, not necessarily letter boxes, are draped in colorful knitwear shaped like bunnies, caterpillars, teddy bears, cave men...you name it.

Joanna Sugden tells us in the A-Hed piece that yarn bombing is practiced all over the world, but nowhere like it is in England. England apparently has more Miss Marple-type women who knit up a storm. Maybe it's the damp weather that keeps them indoors clicking away with their needles, or sitting on those lovely park benches

Some of the die-hard knitters have given up replenishing their letter boxes with knitted creations and taken to displaying them indoors in a less sticky-finger environment.

I've never seen an example of yarn bombing here in New York. In fact, the only knitted thing I've ever seen placed on top of something here is a covering for the spare roll of toilet paper found in the better homes I've ever been in.

It is doubtful the United States Postal Service would allow its letter boxes to be "yarn bombed." They wouldn't have to wait for someone to walk off with the creation. I have no doubt the F.B.I. would be called in to remove them thinking they might be a terrorist threat.

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