by jphilo | Apr 14, 2015 | Top Ten Tuesday
Well, well, well, the recent series about the top ten things collected by Great Depression era moms and ten more things they collected certainly struck a chord with readers. Thanks to all who left comments on FB about what your moms saved. My favorite was this classic: Mom would hang paper towels up to dry if she only used them to wash her hands.
In those posts, I promised to air my own dirty paper towel laundry about the silly things I collect…habits drilled into me by my frugal Great Depression era mother. Here goes, and feel free to step in any time to air your silly saving habits, too!
10. Pens. Every conference I attend, I resolve not to pick up any free pens. But the vendors are so persistent, and the pens are so cute. Pretty soon, I’ll need to start collecting cups for storing pens on the top of my desk.
9. Geranium stems that break off the plants I winter over. I would save African violet leaves and stems, too, but I am death to African violets. But my cousin Karen saves them. Since we were childhood best friends, I save then vicariously through her.
8. Rain water for watering houseplants and the geraniums I winter over. The water is saved in the gallon plastic milk jugs I also collect.
7. Shoe boxes. They’re very handy for packing and mailing biscotti to publishers when a new book launches.
6. Rubber bands and twisty ties.Throwing them away just isn’t right.
5. Vegan butter spread tubs. The hip, new gen version of margarine tubs.
4. Plastic grocery bags. And the occasional tissue box, which make excellent plastic grocery bag dispensers.
3. Wrapping paper, foil, and waxed paper inner rolls. My daughter-in-law makes the coolest stuff for her kids out of them.
2. Toilet paper rolls. Because walking through the door and handing them to your 2-year-old grandson immediately makes you a rock star in his eyes.
1. Memories. The more I gather, the dearer the people in them become and my life grows richer with each one.
Okay, confession time…what do you collect? Leave a comment!
by jphilo | Apr 7, 2015 | Top Ten Tuesday
Last Tuesday’s post listed ten of the items my mother, raised during the Great Depression, continued to save for decades after the Depression ended. Pretty much until 2008 when she gave up housekeeping and moved in with my brother and his family. Ten is not nearly enough space to list 8 decades worth of collecting, so today’s post doubles the list, as well as doubling the awe of present-day penny pinchers who have no idea what it means to be truly frugal.
10. Used aluminum foil. Yes, foil can be washed carefully in soapy water, dried with a dishtowel, smoothed on the counter, folded like a napkin, and saved in the same drawer as the box of foil…sometimes more than once.
9. Free pencils from the lumberyard, the feed store, and especially in the commercial building at the county fair. The fair was providentially scheduled only a month before school started, so Mom hid that pencil haul until the night before school began when she doled them out to her children, who had no idea pencils could be purchased at the dime store.
8. Free yardsticks from either the furniture store or lumberyard. But Mom preferred the ones from the lumberyard because they made better paddles in case her poor, deprived, perfect children needed a spanking.
7. Half-gallon paper milk cartons, plastic gallon milk cartons, and tin cans. These were saved in January and February in order to have a sufficient supply in March to use for starting tomato, pepper, cabbage, and other garden plants.
6. African violet leaves and geraniums stems. When these items accidentally snapped off either plant, perhaps when poor, deprived perfect siblings tussled with one another and knocked the plant over–unaware that their mom had just acquired a new, stout yardstick from the lumberyard–the leaves and stems were immediately collected and placed in a peanut butter jar (see #7 from previous list) filled with water to re-root. Only when the plant bits were safely delivered to their new, watery home did the mother field test the yardstick on her poor, deprived, perfect children’s backsides.
5. Plants spotted in the ditch. Mom dug these out with the shovel she kept in the trunk–for emergency situations like spotting lilac suckers along a fence line–while her children huddled in the back seat praying no one they knew would drive by and recognize them. Or their mother. Or their car.
4. Shoe boxes. (see #8 from previous list)
3. Cardboard boxes* used for for sending packages through the mail (again see #8 from previous list) wrapped in…
2. …brown paper salvaged from large paper grocery sacks. Or the boxes mentioned in #3 might be filled with presents and covered with…
1. …used wrapping paper. The present would not be secured with string–that would be tacky–but with masking tape (cheaper than cellophane tape) rolled into a sticky-side-out tube and discretely tucked under the outside flap of the hopefully not-too-wrinkled, wrapping paper saved from last year’s Christmas, birthday, wedding, baby, and bridal shower celebrations.
*To be fair, the boxes pictured at the top of the page came from my mother-in-law (also raised during the Great Depression), not from my mother.
So, what’s missing from the list? Add your items in the comment box.
by jphilo | Mar 31, 2015 | Top Ten Tuesday
The last time my sister and I were together, we started a list of the things saved by our mom, who was raised on a farm during the Great Depression. She continued to save these items throughout our growing up years in the 1960s. My sister, brother, and I did not know many of the items on this list (and the list to be featured next week because Mom saved much more than a single top ten list can accommodate) could be purchased in stores because Mom never, ever bought them. Prepare to be awed, penny pinchers of the present, by what you should never purchase from a store again.
10. Rubber bands used to bundle the newspaper, the mail, green onions, and anything else bundleable.
9. Twine. I don’t know if Mom scavenged this from hay bales during visits to her parents’ and siblings’ farms, but there were bits of twine scattered around the garage all the time.
8. The string the sales staff at the shoe store wrapped around the boxes to make new school shoes for three kids easier to carry to the car. This string was later used to tie shut packages to be mailed at the post office, which yielded two more savings: no need to buy tape and a cheaper mailing rate for packages wrapped in string.
7. Peanut butter and mayonnaise jars. Mom saved the former for storing leftovers, eliminating the need for Tupperware. She collected the latter to be used for canning, eliminating the purchase of wide-mouthed canning jars. Occasionally, we saved jelly jars to use as juice glasses, but Mom usually bought big jars of jelly because they were much cheaper.
6. The cotton stuffed in the top of aspirin and other non-prescription and prescription pill bottles. The plugs pulled from children’s aspirin bottles were the best because they smelled orangy, sort of like Tang, which Mom bought once and then declared too expensive.
5. Ketchup, mustard, mayo, sugar, salt, pepper, and jelly packets from restaurants. Since we went out to eat once a month at the most, we stripped the table bare because, as Mom said, “It’s not stealing. We paid for this stuff with the meal.”
4. In the same vein as #6, we stuffed paper napkins in our pockets and sucked water through our straws, to rinse them clean before Mom confiscated gathered them in her purse.
3. Small paper bags from the grocery store to use for school sack lunches. Saving these meant that throughout my elementary years, I lusted in my heart for my classmates’ Roy Rogers, Mickey Mouse, and Lost in Space metal lunch boxes. Sigh!
2. Twisty ties from bread bags, which Mom insisted on collecting because she also collected…
1. …bread bags–sometimes for Grandma, who used them to make padded hangers like the one pictured above–but sometimes for our family because no self-respecting woman would buy Baggies. Which resulted in a scarcity of twisty ties at our house because only other way to score twisty-ties was by purchasing a box of Baggies.
Be sure to stop back next week for the rest of the collection list. In the meantime, join the fun by leaving a comment about what your family collected to keep the creditors–real and imaginary–at bay.
