Aunt Millie Demonstrates the Fun of Thriftiness in Happy Birthday, Kit!

The American Girl series uses books and dolls to teach pre-teen girls about various periods in America’s history. Kit Kittredge is a spunky tomboy whose story begins in 1934, when the Great Depression begins to have a major effect on her cozy lifestyle. Happy Birthday, Kit! is the fourth in a series of six books charting the changes in her life over the year and half following the closing of her dad’s car dealership.

Before I read the books, I watched the movie Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. Of the six, only one book is less represented in the movie than this one. The main thing that carries over to the film is her adoption of a droopy hound dog and her efforts to sell eggs to her neighbors. The most significant side character in this book doesn’t make it to the big screen, and that’s a shame because she’s a lot of fun.

Happy Birthday, Kit! begins with the arrival of “Aunt Millie,” the woman who raised Kit’s father for much of his childhood. An effusive woman with a host of funny country expressions and oodles of tips for making ends meet during tough times, she becomes Kit’s roommate, an arrangement which the budding reporter mostly loves. She finds her ideas so interesting that she begins putting them into a book, with some help from her best friend Ruthie and Stirling, an artistic boy who is one of several boarders in the Kittredge home.

Although the story is set in the 1930s, some of Aunt Millie’s tricks seem like they could be useful today, and certainly her general air of cheerful thriftiness is something worth emulating. Valerie Tripp writes the character with great affection and personality, making me wonder whether she might have grown up with a mentor like this in her own life. Meanwhile, Walter Rane fills the margins with interesting thumbnails, like a portrait of William Shakespeare (who Millie loves to quote) and an old-fashioned sewing machine. Full-page illustrations focus on key moments among characters, like when Kit and Millie, assisted by others in the family, plant a vegetable garden.

The main point of this particular volume seems to be showing how fun it can be to think shrewdly about money. For the most part, Kit embraces her aunt’s suggestions, generally finding them ingenious and not minding so much if they’re strange. But she also keeps her home life strictly separated from her classroom, and she doesn’t want her classmates to know how hard her family has to work just to get by. Hence, there’s also a lesson in dealing with potential peer ridicule.

I enjoyed all of the installments in the Kit series, but I think this one is my favorite because there’s such a sense of joy that pervades it. Kit’s family is not on stable financial ground by any means, but they’re managing, and thanks to Aunt Millie, they have a lot of excellent ways to stretch their resources just a little further, whether it’s by patching shoes or adding dandelion greens to the dinner salad. It’s a very optimistic book offering hope that with some creativity and teamwork, families and friends can endure difficult times and even have fun in the process.