I’m another one who saves sturdy plastic silverware to reuse in bag lunches or for picnics and parties. Why not, when you can just toss it in the dishwasher? If you throw it away you’ll just have to buy another package. When my next-door neighbor moved across the country, I also inherited her collection of used plastic silverware. Hers was epic.
A woman we know in California is a “hoarder”. However, she is also very, uh, thrifty.
Years ago, they had a special at McDonalds - on Tuesdays only, you could get a cheeseburger for 50 cents.
She would go on Tuesday and buy 7.
OK, you think - what is the big deal - she is hungry and wants to eat cheap.
Well - she would then eat ONE and put the other six in the bag, in her car, and eat one every day for the next six days until Tuesday came around again.
It is a miracle she didn’t die of food poisoning - can you imagine what that last cheeseburger looked like, and tasted like, 6 days later, after sitting in her car!!!
BTW, this woman was anything but poor - she was a teacher, and also had steady income from her deceased husband’s retirement fund, plus owned her own condo outright!
I think it says more about the lack of nutritional value in McDonald’s “cheeseburgers”, honestly. If bacteria and mold won’t eat it, should we? 
The most frugal people I know are the ones who have the most money. That’s how they got it, apparently.
I have a friend who owns five farms. But he’ll travel to Alaska or California and be gone for weeks and come back bragging about how little money he spent. He sleeps in his pickup truck and eats canned beans.
I did the camping instead of the hotel thing before. Twice, in fact- I was a DUI school instructor at the time and was required to go to an annual convention. The convention was at a hotel on Jekyll Island, and I was pretty broke. The Jekyll Island campground was $12 a night back then and the hotel was $79 a night one year and $99 the next. A two-night stay was necessary. The only problem was I got robbed blind by the raccoons.
I swiped a plastic pepper shaker from a McDonald’s once. I guess I could have afforded some pepper if I hadn’t eaten at McDonald’s that day. I ate enough at that McD’s over the years that I don’t feel guilty.
You could use more than one pic as substitute panels. For instance, one pic of her in one setting, another pic in another setting, and maybe one pic with Mom and Dad. And I bet the Grandmas WILL love it. Put one panel with the year, too, something like Merry Christmas 2010. Check out the other DIY projects from that site, you can probably keep Kiddo busy for a while. Also, I can give you a link that shows how to make paper beads. If you have a paper cutter, USE it. I have used glue sticks instead of paste, and put on a dab of clear glue (Elmer’s or Tacky glue) over the completed bead. Letting your child use the glue stick and you finishing up with the clear glue would probably result in the best results and the least mess. Catalogs and magazines can provide good quality paper in interesting prints. If you get flyers which are printed on colored sheets of paper, use them. I’ve had very nice results with blue paper flyers, as I collected several colors of them, so the shades vary. Also, I read a neighborhood newsletter which is printed in black ink on beige paper, then I make paper beads from it. The beads look like rather intricately carved wooden beads! After you make the paper beads, you could make strings of them for decorating the tree, if that’s your style.
Be sure to make a couple of ornaments for yourself, as well. One for you to keep, and one for her to take with her when she grows up and moves out. When my daughter was young, we got into the habit of having her pick out a pair of fancy ornaments each year, and we retired the cheap satin balls as they got snags. When my daughter moved out, she took one of each pair, and she had a nice set of ornaments.
I bought some water balloons, on sale. I do a lot of crafts with yarn and embroidery floss, and I save most of these scraps. If you do as well, blow up the water balloons, dip the yarn lengths into glue thinned with some water, and then wrap loosely around the balloons. Don’t cover the entire balloon, just a few strands here and there. After the glue dries, pop the balloon and remove it. You’ve got colorful ornaments.
I’ve pooped before showering, but I STILL use toilet paper! Eeeew!!!
Wait a second, WHAT? Under what circumstances?
Most of the things in this thread make me laugh but that makes me want to vomit, unless there’s a really non-disgusting explanation.
Oh yeah, well MY mum shipped two left foot different sized shoes 3,000 miles to me, apparently there’s this great dollar store she knows about …
For those who were raised by parents who, themselves, had weathered the Depression:
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wild meat appeared on the table - Peter Rabbit, Bambi, Bullwinkle, etc. And there was more where that came from, the local freezer plant (we didn’t have home freezers and the fridge’s freezer was about 1 cubic foot) …
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everyone had a huge garden and mothers/wives home canned most of the garden. If I ever see another quart of spiced crab apples again, I will scream. Canned peas look like
canned-peas-in-tins and taste roughly the same. All pickles / relishes etc were home made. -
at the age of 15 I saw my first store-bought Kraft salad dressings. Didn’t know what it was (salads at home came pre-drenched with boiled salad dressing) and thought it was steak sauce…
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“Resurrection Pudding” (aka bread pudding) so-called because it heralded the reappearance of stale bread, cake, cookies … we didn’t like them the first time around, but the butterscotch sauce helped choke the pudding down …
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All soups were homemade, All stews etc were, as well. “Bought” soups and stews were terrible expensive and wasteful. Then came the pizza craze, and Mom would clean out the fridge leftovers onto a yeast dough base …
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Of course we washing out and re-used plastic bags, which we stored in the cupboard with bits of string, paper bags, and the like. One of my mother’s cousins saved margarine containers - she removed the labelling with nail polish remover and was quite proud of the white fridge/freezer containers!
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“Eating out” i.e. not at someone else’s home,was virtually unknown. I remember being in a classy restaurant (classy = not paper napkins) twice. The first time was a treat from my paternal grandmother, who thought six of us could chow down at the best restaurant in town for $20 (in 1956 or so) and Dad had to write a cheque. Grandma just hadn’t BEEN to anything grander than tea and a bun at Woolworth’s counter and had no clue what things cost.
We’re more fortunate than we know.
an seanchai
Even ‘poverty stricken’ now doesn’t have the same meaning as it did in, say, 1931.
Growing up in the sixties, I didn’t have Depression-era parents, just really frugal ones (with five kids) - I’m four for seven on your list, seanchai. 
Mmm, canned crabapples. Yeah, those were not a delicacy - just something you ate for dessert in the middle of winter. The canned peaches and pears were nice, though - my parents always bought a case or two in fall and canned 'em up.
When the holes in the toes of my cotton athletic socks get too big I cut them down the back so they lay flat and use them for rags. If I wipe up something gross I toss them, if not I wash them. I have a ton of them with stashes all around the house, garage and my truck. In fact almost every artical of clothing gets ragged out.
I go through about 1 roll of paper towels a year.
Boy, can I identify with your post, seanchai. I keep thinking when they finally stop calling what we’re dealing with a recession and admit we are at the beginning of our next depression we’re the folks who are going to weather it with the least complaint.
Been there;done that.
You all may have read this in a TightWad book—I did For Free while waiting on my sister (who was unloading a wooden cable spool, aka future lawn furniture, from her truck.)
Anyway my sis and her SO actual plot and plan their lives around suggestions from the book. Such as : have a BYOB party at home and people will leave the liquor bottle they brought. Suddenly you’ve got a bar stocked with your friends’ favorite libations.
I read the book only so I’d know what they were up to; a day with them often includes squirrelly situations.
I’m not anva marie, but I’ll answer since I’ve had experience in this area. Often times, if you know the time the meat department at a grocery store clears out their meat that is past the sell by date, you can get all kinds of frozen meats out of the dumpster.
I have gotten frozen turkeys, bacon, burgers, fish, and chicken out of dumpsters, all still completely frozen, all still in the original packing.
I’ve gotten cases of sodas, juices, condiments, cookies, chips, and crackers out of dumpsters. You name it, and chances are I’ve gotten it out of a dumpster, where the only thing wrong is that the item is past the sell by date. There’s been plenty of times my family has had food to eat due to me or my mom dumpster diving. As long as the food is in the original packaging, and the seals aren’t broke, you’re usually good.
If you watch your local grocery store dumpsters, you can figure out what time they throw stuff out, and a lot of it is still good, just past the sell by date. I don’t know about other areas, but the grocery stores here have separate dumpsters for each type of product, so you generally don’t have to worry about cross contamination.
My Dad is a real “Depression Baby”-when he redecorated his Florida condo, he brought the old kitchen light fixture home…to mount in his garage.
He also insists upon using very old paintbrushes-some of them must be 45 years old! (That’s getting your money’s worth).
Last week a friend spotted a sandwich bar throwing out a case of frozen dough. He squirreled off home with it and called me the next day asking if I wanted some, you see it had defrosted a bit and started escaping from his freezer. I don’t have an oven so I sort of dry fried some flat breads and tossed a bunch of it in a soup - it made great yeasty dumplings.
Tethered Kite - it’s more like been there, done that, never stopped. My kid was scoffing at me reusing tea’ bags (what? they’re too strong) until I triumphantly showed her an article about “the stingiest man in Britain” or some such. This dude actually pegged them out on the line to dry, so I could be worse!
Ok, here’s one. A former co-worker would save the paper towels she used to wipe her hands in the ladies’ room. She told me that once you washed your hands they were clean so the towels were only damp and she couldn’t bring herself to throw them out. She would take them home and use them to clean her house.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwww… To me this is more a behavior disorder rather than being cheap.
I remember one year in elementary school we did a gift exchange at Christmas. We were supposed to bring in a toy $5-10. My mom didn’t buy a gift for it, and I didn’t want to be the only kid who didn’t bring something, so I went in my room and found the only thing I could imagine another kid liking–my Rubik’s Cube. I didn’t have time to solve it (I always needed the book for that) so I wrapped it up jumbled. I was heartbroken when the kid who got it thought it was junk and was pissed off. I never got another Rubik’s Cube and I missed it–my grandparents had gotten it for me. That was more a case of my mom being cheap than anything.
We ALL used to do that in the ancient days of paper zines. Good trick!
Edit - …and I see that I was beaten to the punch.
Joe