Re: an explanation, “Because I said so” was largely regarded as sufficient explanation for just about anything. I don’t know, she was just very possessive about her stuff. There were certain living room chairs and couches I wasn’t allowed to sit in either… anything designated as “hers” was off-limits.
And yeah, it definitely hurt my feelings. I often felt like a social pariah in my own home. I was in high school before I believed that people in general didn’t find me absolutely disgusting because it was the first time I got regular physical contact and people didn’t go “oohhh gross!” at the thought of sharing a drink or item of food with me. It amazed me the ease with which some people could be close to other people, because my Mom wasn’t like that.
But I mean, in retrospect, she obviously was dealing with some kind of issue there. The way she was about “contamination” it wouldn’t surprise me if she had a touch of the OCD.
It was kind of fun the first time, but it became more and more staid and boring as time went by. It also tended to accentuate the perception of any disparities in the number of presents each person got - there would always be a heap of presents left at the end, all addressed to one person.
I just remembered another thing we did; My dad ran a ‘shop’; he bought an initial stock of things like jars of jam, boxes of cornflakes, tins of beans, packets of biscuits and crisps, teabags. These were stored in the walk-in wardrobe in the spare room - he would price the items a few pence higher than their original cost and would ‘buy back’ items from the shop - the takings were then used to replenish the stock at advantageous bulk prices from the cash and carry - the ‘shop’ was a sort of buffer meaning we wouldn’t run out of stuff and it could be restocked at the advantage of special offers.
It also meant that special offer coupons on things like cereal boxes could all be collected at once with no risk the offer would expire before the last coupon was collected.
It failed chiefly because there were also clothes in the cupboard with mothballs in the pockets; tinned food was OK, but the smell of the mothballs pervaded and infused just about everything else.
And another one - very specific this time, but still interesting, I think.
There was a competition on a leading brand of sweets (which I won’t name) - you had to make as many different words - anagrams - as possible from the letters appearing in the name of the brand and product combined, using each letter no more than once (but not necessarily using all of the letters). To be valid, the words all had to appear in the concise OED. The cash prize was enough in those days to set a person up for life if carefully invested.
So, over the course of several months, my dad spent every moment of his spare time working methodically through the entire Concise Oxford English Dictionary, checking each word and writing down all those that qualified. It was a mammoth task and he had to chart and plan the job in order to get it done before the closing date. Social engagements were cancelled, kids were hushed, a room was commandeered as a study.
He completed the list and entered the competition in good time; he didn’t win - he was never given a reason for this (‘judge’s decision final’, etc.), but he did discover that the winner had entered less than half the number of words he had. I might be imagining or misremembering this detail, but I think he also found out that the surname of the winner was the same as the surname of one of the company’s directors - there was certainly some sort of evidence of a ‘fix’.
In any case… this was ‘something odd that our family did’ in the sense that it completely upturned our lives for several months.
On the day before Christmas, we all compete to be the first to say “Merry Christmas Eve” to each other. The tradition is supposedly that if you say it to someone else before they say it to you, they have to buy you another gift. We never buy the extra gifts, but we definitely go for bragging rights. If the phone rings, we answer “Merry Christmas Eve” instead of hello. The practical benefit of this tradition is that it keeps down the number of last-minute calls from relatives on a day when you’re very likely rushing around trying to get things done.
Not especially weird, but this is as good a place as any to get the answer to a question that’s nagging me since I was a kid in the 70’s. My family always refered to a knit cap (stocking cap) as a “toboggan”. We’re from southwest Virginia. The first time I used this word outside of the area, people looked at my like I was insane. Anyone else use this terminology, and where are you from if you do?
Oh, another thing my father in particular did was mention that my sister and I are twins ALL the time. For part of our childhood my twin lived with him and I and my brother lived with my mom. During that time, my sister found some wood in a can of Campbell’s soup and my dad wrote to them that “my daughter, who is a twin, found some wood in a can of soup.” This is just the silliest example of many instances.
Even now, if we both happen to be somewhere in public and he sees baby twins or any kind of twins at all he drags us over to their parents and lets them know he has twins too. We are now middle aged mothers now so these parents of little twins look at ALL of us like we’re freaks. Not just him - ALL of us.
Santa did this for us too - at least until we had a 10-inch snow one year on Christmas Eve. After dragging a 12-foot tree the six blocks from a friend’s house through the snow, my father decided that for subsequent years we would buy the tree and put it up on Christmas Eve, and Santa would just decorate the tree when he brought the presents.
Even though we’re all grown up now and in our 30s and 40s, we still don’t decorate the tree at my parents’ house until Christmas Eve.
We did something similar, but on Christmas eve. (Santa also came on Christmas eve, so we’d get his presents last, as he’d leave them outside while we were having dinner.) No wonder I thought it mildly barbaric to NOT wait and watch each person open their gifts individually at my future in-laws’ house. Then again, she thinks that we don’t read the bible, don’t go to church for Christmas, and don’t wait until Christmas morning to be really barbaric too, so we’re even.
I take my shoes off when I enter someone’s house if I’ve been given a signal that it’s allowed or encouraged. Why? I’m more comfortable removing my shoes when I enter a house, and I think it’s a little weird to want to be in shoes all the time.
I grew up eating dinner around 8 or 9pm (and sometimes as late as 10pm), and until college, felt a little awkward eating dinner any earlier than 7pm, as, well, I wasn’t hungry until then. Four years later, and I’m just getting used to the idea of eating dinner at 6pm or so; I can’t fathom wanting to eat at 5pm, but I’ve been a visitor in houses where that was the norm.
Eggs Served Scrambled: you got ketchup on your plate whether you wanted it of not. “Don’t like it? Don’t eat it then…!”
Mashed potatoes: about 10 tablespoons full of black pepper were dropped in a pot of mashed potatoes while cooking them. The result was mashed potatoes with black specks that tasted rather good. At Thanksgiving, diced onions would be added as a special treat.
Ketchup: “There’s plenty of ketchup in that bottle!” followed by a trip to the sink, filling the bottle 1/5 with water, replacing the cap, shaking vigorously, and handing bottle with red watery liquid back to the person who said we were out of ketchup.
Honey-suckle: The back fence was over-grown with a plant that I was taught to call ‘honey-suckle’. The treat was when the flowers would bloom, you’d pick off a bloom, pull out the stem, and drink the few drops of nectar like candy.
Mashed Turnips. Nuff said.
Shrimp Cocktail: before the meal at Christmas Eve & Easter, we were treated to 4 or 5 shrimp, served with cocktail sauce.
The Salad Bowl: before dinner, this massively huge 1-2 gallon bowl was filled with shredded letuce, celery, and sliced tomatoes was set in the middle of the table. You were expected to eat a full serving (serving size determined by parent) before you were allowed to get your dinner from the stove.
Well, my family does the same as the OP: one-use towel, bread in a breadbox. However, after moving in with my husband, I discovered he would re-use towels (which squicked me out at first, but now makes more sense, since we had limited towels to start out with and had coin operated laundry), and also, as primary grocery-buyer in the household, discovered that I could keep a loaf or two of bread in the freezer to keep it longer, then haul it out to thaw when needed. (Never put it in the fridge, though). During a recent trip to IKEA, however, I waxed nostalgic and wound up buying a wooden breadbox. Now it takes up space on my counter and holds all manner of bun.
As I’m thinking about the towel thing, something else is coming to mind that I haven’t seen in anyone else’s house: a laundry chute. No, not like the long metal ones you see on TV or that they have in college dorms. My father built our house from the basement up. We originally lived in the “basement” (liveable with a kitchen, bathroom, living area, and two bedrooms), then as we could afford it, built on up until we lived completely upstairs. Our old basement kitchen was turned into a laundry room. Our new upstairs bathroom was built over the old kitchen. In the bathroom, my father built a closet for towels and toiletries. The bottom shelf has an interesting little feature: a hinged piece of wood (that he covered in leftover linoleum to make it “sticky”; that is, it didn’t just swing open easily, you had to give it a decent kick, though it was heavy enough to swing back into place afterwards) that was just a touch long enough so that it didn’t swing back and forth, just one way. This opened to a hole in the floor the size of the closet, into which we simply kicked all of our dirty clothes/towels. When you finished taking a shower, you kicked your towel down the chute. When you had dirty clothes, you simply took them to the bathroom, dropped them on the floor, opened the folding closet door and gave them a good kick down the chute. “Chute” is an inaccurate word, since it was really just a hole in the closet floor with a flap over it. But that’s what we called it, it was handy, and no one ever knew what I was talking about when I brought it up. When people stayed over and needed their laundry done and I told them to just kick it down the chute, they thought I was nut.
Breadboxes; haven’t seen one in years-Grandma had one. I suspect they are from the days when you bought fresh bread every day. My family idiosyncracies: "dropuots’ I have three cousins who nodoy has seen in years-and nobody talks about them. One is a cousin who got into an argument over grandpa’s will-he had a big fight with my aunts, and doesn’t talk to anybody. Another cousin moved to Florida-and never came back.
And my great-uncle: nobody has heard from him since 1939: the family has just about given up.
For reasons unknown one year when I was 9 we started celebrating St. Nicolas Day on December 6th. We’d each set a shoe outside our bedroom door at night and in the morning it was filled with nuts and fruit. We kept this up for 10 years. I still don’t know why
For years my parents wouldn’t throw out bacon fat. It was poured into a coffee cup reserved for that purpose and kept in the fridge. The fat was re-used to fry eggs, brown beef or other meats or my personal favorite, make popcorn. I still do this sometimes just out of habit though I never use it. It just sits around till I scoop it out into the trash.
“Toboggan” is a Quebecois word. (For the type of sled.)
Americans have historically called a toque a “toboggan cap” or “toboggan hat,” because they don’t know any better. It’s natural enough that it got shortened, I suppose.
We have always had a bread drawer - a larger drawer at the bottom of the cabinets to keep bread and such in, and then when I moved out onto my own I kept it on the counter or in a nice little wooden box that says “Bread” on it…
In our family, we called that kind of hat a toque for the most part, but I knew that another name for it was a toboggan, or even a tobogganer. I’m pretty sure that my grandma called it a tobogganer, because I think of it as one of those “words that old people say.” She also said davenport, another old person word, instead of couch.
It’s natural enough that it got shortened, I suppose.