SPAREFROH

About a week ago I entered an online contest and I ended up winning. The prize was the "Sparefroh" PEZ dispenser. Today we received this one in the mail today. I really like this one. I like that the feet are a different color than the stem. I was looking at the character and wondering what the story was behind it....

Sparefroh is a European promotional PEZ for Austrian banks made in celebration of "World Savings Day".  The "World Savings Day" is usually held on October 31 except in countries where this day is a public holiday, since the idea is for the banks to be open, so that the people are able to transfer their savings into their account. The idea of "World Thrift Day" was not born out of nothing. There had been some examples of days that were committed to the idea of saving money in order to gain a higher standard of life and to secure the economy, for example in Spain where the first national thrift day was celebrated in 1921, or in the United States. In other countries, such as Germany, the peoples’ confidence in savings had to be restored since many of them had lost their savings in the German monetary reform of 1923.
After the Second World War, "World Thrift Day" continued and reached the peak of its popularity in the years between 1955 and 1970. It practically became a veritable tradition in certain countries. In Austria, for instance, the official mascot of saving, the so-called 'Sparefroh' (literally: ‘Happy Saver’, or rather "save happily!") reached a higher degree of brand awareness than the republic’s President and even a street was named after him. In the 1970s, the ‘Sparefroh-Journal’, an educational magazine for younger people, reached a circulation of 400,000 copies.