My family used to have a bread bin. I vaguely remember a white-and-yellow plastic thing with a lid. But we’ve refrigerated bread for years. I feel the odd-one-out here in Auckland because I don’t freeze the bread (no room in the top freezer, at the moment.)
And yes, I re-use towels before washing them.
One thing I thought everyone did as I grew up was iron handkerchiefs. I did that task – and found it one of the most tedious things out. I was relieved to find that I didn’t have to do it anymore when I got older.
That’s how we did it too, back in the good old civilized days when I was but a child. Things have degenerated to the point where people are recieving gifts while the last person is still unwrapping theirs. A lot of times, we miss seeing people open the things we got for them, and then when it’s all over, we go around asking everyone what they got from everyone else.
I remember one year in particular where we all just dived in, grabbed our stuff, and whipped off the paper all at once. It was bedlam, and it was over in less than ten minutes.
We do that too. My pills/cold meds etc are kept in a basket on my bureau (line of sight so I don’t forget such things as my BC, and close enough that I don’t have to go searching for cold meds when I’m hacking up a lung in the middle of the night), Mom’s and more cold meds and tylenol are in the kitchen, along with bandages and polysporin. (I’m more likely to need a bandage in the kitchen than I am in the bathroom…)
Odd things we did?
Well, we never opened our Christmas presents before breakfast (and we couldn’t wake anyone up before 7). We could sneak out and look in our stockings, but that was it.
Another favourite was Dad waking us up on a weekend or summer day and telling us we’re going for a drive. We never knew where we’d end up (often in the mountains or somewhere hours away from where we lived) and we would usually get back late at night. We called it going to LA, which is our term for going on any aimless drive and more amusing when you realize that we’re in Canada and a long drive away from LA. Last time I did that was actually 2003, Dad called me up on a Friday night and asked me what I was doing the next day. When I said I had no plans he said he’d pick me up. He did, we wandered through a few places and eventually hit the mountains (and the hot springs) and eventually made it back sometime after midnight.
I can’t wait until I have my license and can do that sort of thing with my son!
We kept our teaspoons in a mug on the kitchen counter. Just the spoons; all the other flatware was in the tray in the drawer. (My grandmother did that too; I think that’s where we got it from.) Anybody else do that?
My mom would buy bread at the bakery outlet, and we’d make a bunch of bologna sandwiches with butter, pack them in baggies, and put them in the freezer along with the Zingers (snack cakes). Then my sister and I could take a sandwich and a Zinger every day for lunch, and they’d be thawed by lunchtime. (My mom never seemed to catch on to why a 10-count box of Zingers never lasted a week for 2 kids, 5 lunches a week. Apparently she never heard of the after-school snack. Zingers taste awesome frozen!)
Our fridge had a little switch on the butter compartment that you could turn on to keep the butter soft. Never saw that at anyone else’s house.
My grandmother always kept all of her Xmas decorations up until Russian Christmas. She passed this on to my mom. Here’s the odd part, nobody in my extended family was Eastern Orthodox or had a drop of Russian ancestry.
Just FreeCycled my breadbox when we moved into this house three months ago due to a shortage of counter space. It had been in use for 20+ years before that. It’s probably the only thing I’ve every FreeCycled that I regret because Mr. AdoptaMom’s brother built it AND we still haven’t found a good home for the bread in our house!
All meds & first aid supplies are kept in a kitchen cabinet. Much handier there than way off in the bathroom, plus the kitchen isn’t nearly as humid.
Christmas morning is a free for all. With all the kids who’ve been through our family over the years we’d still be opening presents on New Years Eve if we all took turns. It’s chaotic, but fun.
Towels are washed once a week. AdoptaDad and I use them more than once each, but the kids use them and drop them on the floors of their room & forget to bring them back into the bathroom with them, so they grab a fresh one almost every time. When I was a teenager my room was knee deep in towels, so I really don’t fuss at AdoptaTeens for being slobs, too.
Fruitbowl? We try to keep it full and on the counter, but they go through spurts where they will wipe it all out in a day or two, and other times it will rot. Part of being growing kids I guess.
Our oddity? I always forget to take the bay leaf out of whatever I’m cooking (spaghetti, red beans & rice, etc.) so the first time it happened we said that whoever got the bay leaf in their plate could use it as a get out of jail free card on dishes duty that night. AdoptaKids have fought over who got the bay leaf ever since then.
Well. My Mom only let me watch certain TV shows… which wouldn’t be too unusual, except her criteria for censure wasn’t “violence” or “sexuality”… it was “weirdness.” When I was a kid I was not permitted to watch PeeWee’s playhouse or Family Matters because they were too weird.
One thing I know was rather unusual is that starting at about age 10 we didn’t have community food. I wasn’t allowed to eat anything that was designated as belonging to my parents… I remember my Mom once threw out a whole container of chocolate milk powder because I used it. Every week we’d both go shopping, so the bonus I guess is that I got to pick out whatever the heck I wanted to eat, just load up the grocery cart and that was it. A couple of days a week we’d have family dinners like normal people. But usually our food experiences were completely separate.
Our Easter Bunny always came three times - we’d wake up to a small egg on Good Friday, another on Easter Saturday, and on Easter Sunday we’d get our large egg (actually, usually a large stuffed toy with a medium sized egg attached). Easter Bunny always left our eggs on the ends of our beds, he never hid them like he did with some of my friends.
On Christmas Eve we’d drive around looking at Christmas tree lights. Back then, people didn’t usually put up outdoor lights or decorate outdoors (with the exception of door wreaths) so we were pretty much the only family driving around, trying to spot Christmas tree lights in people’s windows. It was a cunning plan by my parents to try to get us to drop off to sleep. Also, my father told us that Santa charged the parents for the presents he brought.
We had a bread bin and only used our towels once. These days I keep my bread in the freezer, but I still (usually) only use my towel once.
As discussed recently, we weren’t allowed to wear new underwear straight from the packet - it had to be washed first. I still can’t wear new, unwashed underwear.
The tooth fairy would sometimes take days to show up and collect a lost tooth, and she wouldn’t take them from under a pillow - they had to be left in a glass of water in the kitchen.
My parents keep meds in the kitchen too and I do too - only I use a drawer instead of a cabinet.
We keep our bread in a drawer too.
We also keep our butter dish out, not in the fridge. It doesn’t spoil, and stays nice and soft. I guess if you have hard, cold refrigerated bread you can put cold butter on it! But I likes my bread and butter soft…mmmmmm…butter…
My parents don’t answer the phone during dinner, no matter who it is calling.
My mom always noted my half birthday too in some small way. We also made a big deal of my Golden Birthday (the day when you turn the same age as the date you were born. So if you were born on the 9th, your 9th birthday is your Golden Birthday.) No one else has ever heard of this.
Ooooh, we didn’t do that in our house growing up, but my grandmother did. It was like a spoon caddy that was always on the lazy susan on the kitchen table.
One thing we did do in our house was keep butter out on the counter. I didn’t know that other people think this is gross and icky until I went to college. I would like to say at least the butter dish was covered, but in reality it was only covered when someone remembered to put the cover back on the dish.
The other funny thing I remember was eating dinner in the cellar during the summer on very hot days. It wasn’t a finished basement, just the regular kind with a furnace and tool bench and washing machine. There was also a beat up card table that was used for folding laundry. In the summer, the kitchen would get so hot from cooking that my mom would serve everyone’s plate upstairs, and then we would all troop down to the cellar and sit around the card table to eat. Obviously, we did not have air conditioning.
Oh, and when I was about 8, our family got a spiffy new television with a REMOTE CONTROL at Christmas one year. My brother and I promptly broke the remote control because we fought over it and tried to push all the buttons at once. My mom declared that our punishment would be not having a remote control, so you had to get up and change the channels on the set itself. At some point when we were teenagers, little bro and I realized that it was possible to buy a new remote at Radio Shack for a fairly modest price - we bought one and my mom took it away because I suppose we were still being punished. There was no remote control until maybe five years ago (I was over 30 at that point, and the original incident happened when I was 8) when the TV finally died and we got Mom a new one for Christmas.
TO THIS DAY, I will sometimes get up to change the channel because I forget to use the remote.
Wow, I think that might take the cake for this thread! Was there any explanation? Why would she throw out the chocolate milk? If you don’t mind my asking, did it hurt your feelings?
I can’t think of much odd stuff that my immediate family did, but my extended family has some odd stuff. My dad’s family/extended family all lives in the same town, and while he was growing up they gradually acquired a couple houses. Then, every couple years, when they felt the need to move, they’d just swap houses, like a big game of round robin.
That same family has an isolated house out in the woods that great-granddad built by hand. Whenever anyone buys a new car, they don’t junk their old one, they just drive out to the house and park it in the back and leave it there to rust. I don’t know how many are parked there by now; I’m not allowed to go, since the place is apparently falling apart and it’s a sensitive issue.
Oh, I thought of one odd thing my family does: practically any sweet stuff that comes into my house – cookies, candy, chocolate, etc. – my mom immediately throws into the freezer. It’s infuriating; apparently, her philosophy is that it will keep us from eating it, or at least enjoying it (since we’re all perpetually supposed to be on a diet). So she’ll buy a thing of Tollhouse cookies, throw it in the freezer, and then if we want one we have to wait forever for it to thaw, or microwave it, which sucks.
My husband’s family does the same thing, which is why I’ve always avoided spending Christmas with them. I find it incredibly tedious having wait as Aunt Mary carefully picks the tape away from the paper lest it tear and then having to go through the painfully dutiful practice of admiring every gift. And they used to make rounds to all of the aunt’s and uncle’s places to go through the same process again and again!
My family’s gift exchange is a riot of laughter, flying shreds of paper and small children screeching with delight as they wrench the toy they’ve been coveting from its box. “Thank yous” are shouted across the room, and the dog grabs ahold of a wad of paper and shreds it beneath the coffee table. It’s a cheerful pandemonium, over within minutes when the adults retreat to stuff their faces while the kids tumble on the carpet with their new playthings.
My husband has told me that sometimes he wouldn’t be able to play with his toys until the next day because of these family gatherings. That just seems awful to me, though I’m sure that my family’s tumult was probably off-putting to him at first as well.
My family did the one use towel thing too. I didn’t use my towel more than once until I went to college and had to save money on laundry.
One weird thing my family also did (and I don’t know why we did it), is that we announced when we had to go to the bathroom. For instance, we would be watching TV, and my mom would get up and say “I have to go to the bathroom”. It wasn’t a proclamation or anything, just a casual remark. I never really thought it was weird, until I grew older and noticed that other families did not do this..
My towel thing is quite simple really, the majority of my clothes are black and the towels are the only white things (apart from some sports socks) that I possess In a skewed kind of way, it makes sense to me to use a fresh towel for each bath so that when it comes time to do laundry, I have a full load of whites.
