China is, in my opinion, about the most useless god damned thing ever conceived. My sister got the same pattern as my step-mother (or maybe it was the silver) so that she could inherit it and have even more of it. I’d be stunned if my sister ever used the china. Who the fuck wants valuable plates where it’s a tragedy if it breaks and can’t go in the dishwasher?
Stepmom was convinced for some unfathomable reason that my then fiancee and I would regret not having china on our wedding registry. Do you even know us? We’re hippies. When would there ever be an event at my house where paper plates, let along regular plates, wouldn’t suffice?
My sister was going to take my grandmother’s hand quilted, hand pieced depression-era quilts to the dump, because they were, admittedly, worn out. I took them, stabiliized them with new backing, and hung them on my walls. Knowing my grandmother, she would have thought that was effort wasted, since to her, things she made were to be used, and used up. But I love them. They remind me of her. We also have some few real heirlooms from my husband’s family, who were far wealthier and have been in this country far longer – a Civil War officer’s cavalry sword (unclear which side as his ancestors fought on both), and a large oil of a clipper ship that his great grand-uncle captained around the Horn. His family has a lot of this type of stuff floating about. They go a lot better in the post-colonial farmhouse we live in now than our previous hand-built hippie house.
His brother is a hoarder. For example the clipper ship painting is something my husband found stored behind thirty boxes of books that prevented anyone from entering the spare room. His brother didn’t know it was there, but also didn’t let go of it without a struggle. A mental illness.
There are one or two things I’d like from my parents’ house; my father still lives there. But if I don’t get them, oh well. None of it has sentimental value to me.
40-ish years ago, I saw a Lladro figure that I really liked, but I was broke. I’m not much for knick-knack things, but I wouldn’t mind that particular piece on my display shelf. Not enough to buy the linked one, tho.
Yeah, that is definitely one of the standard colloquial meanings of the term “heirloom”: something that is passed down in a family and that the inheritors feel some sense of family responsibility about, irrespective of its monetary value.
There are other definitions of “heirloom”, of course, some of which involve rather abstruse legal distinctions, as any reader of Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds knows.
I’ve often thought that business offices (especially nonprofits or any other business watching their pennies or their environmental impacts), conference centers, etc., should become go-to donation sites for unwanted sets of “good” china.
Use it for food at meetings, conference dinners, etc., stick it in the dishwasher (most modern dishwashers have a “fine china” setting anyway), and if it breaks, who cares, just throw it away. In the meantime, you have pretty tableware for corporate events that makes a nice impression, didn’t cost you anything, is an ecologically responsible re-use of existing items, and is damn near infinitely replaceable by other unwanted sets of “good” china.
Far more appealing and conversation-starting than companies continually purchasing new sets of those dreary institutional-looking plain white earthenware table settings.
I’m clearly the outlier here. We have a set of wedding china that we really like. We use it Thanksgiving and for the Passover Seder. And sometimes when company comes over. It goes on the dishwasher just fine. (have you ever opened your dishwasher and found a newly broken plate? Neither have i. I guess gold paint can come off, but ours don’t have any of that. The pattern was glazed on.)
We picked the pattern, and then discovered it’s a pattern my father wanted, but my mother overruled. So we got a couple of odd pieces we don’t actually use that he bought on their honeymoon as a sort of consolation prize.
I also have pretty cobalt blue glass tumblers i use with the china. They were (mostly) my grandmother’s, but she didn’t have enough to set the table when everyone is over, so i bought some that look pretty similar on eBay.
I suppose the china will be a white elephant when we die. My kids probably won’t want it. But that’s okay. It’s given us many years of enjoyable service.
Some china can be cleaned in the dishwasher. It’s the inability to use it in the microwave, because so many of the items contain metals, that makes it essentially worthless nowadays.
Again, though, this applies only to fine china designs that contain gilding or other metal decoration. A delicate bone china or other porcelain plate with a lovely floral pattern, on the other hand? Every chinaware site I’ve seen says that you can nuke that motherducker.
I’d always heard that it was the gold leaf that would come off, not that it would shatter. I think my stepmom uses hers (from her first marriage) on Passover or maybe she used to. I don’t pay that close attention.
We didn’t choose a pattern with gold leaf in part because dishwashers and microwaves were already ubiquitous when we married. I don’t know that I’ve ever put the stuff in the microwave, but we routinely wash it in the dishwasher.
When my wife’s grandmother made her 1-way move to the nursing home, the family cleared out her attic and gave away a lot of stuff. Based on the fact that I’m a guy and it was nothing but sisters, I got a shoe box full of old baseball cards. When I looked, they were mostly from the late 50s.
Just boring stuff like:
Willie Mays
Stan Musial
Ty Cobb
Hank Aaron
even an early Mickey Mantle
and on and on. Not a newsworthy find, but valuable nonetheless.
I took them to a card shop and the owner immediately told me to stop handling them, and put them in plastic sleeves. I took them back to the sisters and explained they were pretty valuable. The sisters sold them to a card shop in their state, and put the money in her (Grandma’s) nursing home fund. It was a godsend, since she wasn’t well off at all.
As far as heirlooms, I was wandering around my parents’ house recently and began to realize they keep everything. And eventually I will need to decide the fate of literally truckloads of stuff. It will be a full time job for longer than I care to contemplate. I don’t know what’s valuable or not, but it’s nice stuff.
My mother’s grand mother had a pocket watch. Nobody ever knew anything about said pocket watch, including her husband of over 50 years. The watch never ran and wasn’t ever used or discussed, it was just something that she kept in her jewelry box.
The watch was left to my mother in her grandmother’s will, with no explanation as to why it was so special.
The watch lived in Mom’s jewelry box until the antique road shows started showing up and she had it appraised. It turned out to be a cheapo watch back when it was bought during the Depression and had not gained any value with time.
During the Depression, a common con was for someone to approach a farm wife during the day (when she would be alone) and spin a tale about having to get somewhere and needing money and all he had as surety was his Grandfather’s watch which he would leave with her as a promise he would return shortly with her money.
(We have, of course, speculated about a stolen kiss or two, but all of her children looked like her husband.)
I have no children. My sisters have an abundance of children. I have the watch.
I expect that when I am gone, someone will say “Hey, nice frame!” and throw both watch and needlework in the trash.
Another unwilling family archivist here, I finally got permission from my sibs to tear all the photos out of the albums, so I could go from 4 very large Home Depot tubs to 1. But here sits that tub. I had my grand-dad’s old stereoscopic slides put on DVD, no one seems to remember that they have that DVD, nor do they remember to pay their share of the processing fee.
And I had the handy dandy storage locker of “Oh, maybe my daughter will want that when she gets married” or “my son might want that, so store it, will you?” One night at a bar, I calculated what I’d spent storing the crap, and of course, no one had ever chipped in a dime. Almost $20K. Yard saled it the next weekend, almost made enough to cover the truck rental to empty the storage locker.
