Scissors in the kitchen. Really. They were only in the desk and for cutting paper. Only. Now I cut bags in the kitchen with abandon. Abandon, I tells ya! Sometimes I make 2 or 3 cuts where only one is needed. Snip, snip, snip!
Colored bell peppers. They were always too expensive. Sure, feed us those disgusting bitter green ones. Ptui! Bleah! They’re cheap for a reason!!! I eat colored peppers almost every day, red ones and yellow ones. If I could find purple ones, they’d be in the fridge, too.
Fabric softener. Like Milhouse Van Houten’s mom, mine didn’t believe in fabric softener.
Of course, that wasn’t an issue after she moved out when I was nine.
You’re one of my siblings, aren’t you?
(Well my grandmother didn’t live with us but everything else above could have been written by me).
There were lots of things - must be a “child of the depression” thing. Probably the greatest thing lacking for me and there fore the most appreciated is variety. Although I still have pretty basic tastes myself, I do enjoy having different things to eat beyond beef & potatoes for dinner. It seems like that was all my father liked (probably due to a lack of that for him as a kid) and so that is all we had.
Pavlov and Laughing,
Whew! That’s a load off. I had such a hard time admitting that. I thought we were so strange.
The scissors talk reminded me of something – tissues.
Growing up we all used hankies. If you didn’t have a clean hankie, you used toilet paper and risked a scowl.
I now have a box of Puffs in every room in the house. Some of them are Puffs with Lotion. 
A whole candy bar. We went through a period of extreme poverty when I was young, and to this day I feel decadent when I eat a whole candy bar. My mom, sister and I used to have to split one candy bar. It sounds weird to split a candy bar, but my mom was very frugal with non-necessities, and was of the opinion that a little bit of good candy was much better than a lot of cheap bad candy.
No, please! I don’t mind your comment in the least, SP2263. I just didn’t want anyone thinking I’d been raised by wolves (you know, the bacon- and OJ-treasuring kind). I’m sending lots of warm-and-fuzzy vibes your way.
I have to second the bacon and orange juice thing. The first time I made a BLT that actually had more than four half-slices of bacon on it, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. And to drink orange juice from a MILK glass…and then refill it? So wonderful.
Aside from the odd hamster or fish, we weren’t allowed to have pets. One of my first acts as a married woman was to get a cat, and now, seven cats and a dog later, I can’t imagine a house without a pet.
Pants with a zipper in the front. As well as being a child of the depression, my mom is a bit prudish, and she did not think it was proper for girls to wear jeans, or any pants with a zipper up the front. We could wear elastic waist pants, or dressier pants with a side or back zipper, but I think she felt the front zipper would lead straight to impure thoughts and actions. She would never admit that, though…just said it wasn’t lady-like. I still remember my first pair of front zip corduroy jeans that I bought with the Christmas money my brother gave me when I was in college. And oddly enough, that was the year I lost my virginity! So maybe Mom was right…though I’d been having the impure thoughts for a long while before that!
We were another one of those families that didn’t drink soda at dinner…milk only, or water. Pop was for the nights we made pizza (why would anyone order pizza when you could make it from scratch?) or for with popcorn. Once I started working for Pizza Hut, mom relented and let us have ordered pizza occasionally.
Free refills.
When we would go to restaurants, my dad would always be careful to mention a place that didn’t have ‘free refills’. He warned that I would get one and only one coke for the meal, and if I guzzled it down before the food came then it was nothing but thawed ice for me to drink the rest of the meal. Later I came to wonder if he was fleecing me on the ‘no free refills’ thing here and was just trying to discourage me from drinking gallons of caffenated sugar water as a child.
As an adult, I actually don’t have much of a taste for coke and whatnot, but I like iced tea. And believe me when I say that if I’m at a restaurant with ‘free refills’ then I’m drinking 5-6 glasses of iced tea.
Post from others also reminded me of three things: Clean house, clean air, and privacy.
As I mentioned in another post, my mom was a hoarder and after I was 7 pretty much gave up cleaning. Pair that with a cat with a bladder control problem and an old house, it got pretty bad. I’m pretty sure that I’ve been exposed to every type of mold known to man thanks to growing up in that house. On the plus side, I think rolling around in cat pee and mold built up my immune system to a godlike mode, because I rarely ever get sick or even colds…but each time I returned home after a long stint away, I’d get a stuffy nose and sore throat as if my body had to reacclimate itself. Messiness all around…was too embarassed to have anyone come over. I was the person most concerned with cleaning, which was horrible for a kid.
As for clean air, my parents and all of my mom’s side were smokers when I was growing up. While I trained my dad not to smoke around me, my mom’s side would never part with their cigarettes. I was in a smoke filled house since I was born until around 18 years of age…I remember going to school in “clean” clothes that made me smell like an ashtray and wanting to cry. My sister was constantly being accused by teachers of smoking. The house was stained with years of smoke. Asking my mom to stop or at least put it out when around me was answered with a “Shut up” or “Look, it’s going out the window!”. At the most, she got me a perfume to spray on myself to mask the odor, which didn’t work at all.
Privacy…Small bungalow, 1 bathroom, 5 people. I had to share my room with my sister which was already small to begin with. Mom was like a hawk. She could stealthily sneak downstairs barely making a noise to spy on me. She would stand at the stairs when I complained to Dad, and then call me down to ask me what I was talking about (even though she knew) and why I never talk to her (our relationship was/is terrible and the cigarette smoke didn’t help). I felt like a prisoner being watched all the time when I went home. Home wasn’t a home, it was just a house with no feeling of relief when I entered it. I joined as many school activities as I could just so I didn’t have to go straight home. I’m still very paranoid and jumpy nowadays. I still jump at every little creak, even though I don’t have anything to hide…it’s just become a reflex.
Good Lord - I’m so sorry. Here’s hoping you now have a clean house, clean air and all the privacy you missed as a child!
Thanks. 
Things have gotten a lot better, going to college gave me the chance to get away from that place, and since my parents divorced my Dad has been cleaning up the house with my help, it’s the cleanest now it has ever been! It definitely gave me an appreciation for having my own room now, privacy, and fresh air- can’t seem to get enough of the stuff!
Coca Cola. My father was employed by Dr Pepper during most of my childhood and I was never allowed to have a Coke because “Coca Cola isn’t paying for this.” The only soft drink I could have was, obviously, Dr Pepper; I wouldn’t drink one today unless I was well paid for doing so.
I went through a period of yanking things out by the cord in college and right after. (I did eventually quit, of course.) For some reason my parents harped on that so much. “Gently unplug the toaster!”
I also occasionally would drink milk straight from the carton. Oh, the delicious badness of such an act! 
The Internet.
Some of my friends had it when I was in junior high (around 1994) and I thought it was amazing. At my house, we didn’t even get a computer until around 1997. And then, we weren’t allowed to even consider asking for online access, as it was “expensive and nothing but trouble.” I guess my parents thought the “bad guys” would have a direct link to our home or something. When I went to college in 1999, my dad bought me a computer for graduation, and the first thing I did when I got to my dorm room was to sit down with all the instructions I could get my hands on and hook up my ethernet connection. It took days, as I had to buy an ethernet card and get help from the local computer geek on my floor. He couldn’t believe I’d never had the internet or my own email address or anything.
Now it’s impossible to imagine a life without it. It’s a necessity on the level of electricity or heat! I pay for fast cable internet (with wireless access) for my two computers without batting an eye.
My grandmother actually saved and reused ziplock bags. She would clean them out and stand them up, mouth end down, to let them dry and then put them back in the drawer. My mother picked up the same habit.
I use them once and then I throw them out. But I feel like my grandma is going to come up out of the grave and give me her disapproving stare and say, “A penny saved…” blah blah blah. If my economic future hinges on whether or not I decide to save or throw out a ziplock bag after one use, then I think I am just going to have to take my chances. Maybe skip driving the leased Cadillac in my retirement years (which is what she drove). I don’t know how I will ever manage. :rolleyes:
Cordless phones. My dad had the idea that they were like cell phones, and incurred $1-$2 charges by the minute, so he refused to have one in the house. He was stubborn, and never relented on this idea.
Beer. Delicious delicious beer.
When I was about 3, I once asked to have two fried eggs for dinner, like Daddy did. I was told “you’ll get two eggs once you’re a Daddy.” Now, I may have been little but I wasn’t a complete idiot, I knew little girls don’t become Daddies. So I answered, furious, “when I’m a Mommy I’ll have three!”
At various other times I was also informed that Thee Shalt Not Have Fried Eggs For Breakfast (Spanish “farmer’s breakfasts” include fried eggs, they’re a lot like “full English” but with different sausages and nothing grown by a plant except for bread, and the olive oil for frying, and maybe squished tomato on the bread, I’m making me hungry here) and that Thee Shalt Not Have Fried Eggs For Lunch Unless It’s “Cuban Rice” (in Spain that means white rice, tomato sauce, one fried egg and sausages - the versions I’ve seen in Cuban restaurants involve beans, no sausage, no fried egg and fried plantains).
I’m neither a Daddy not a Mommy, but nowadays sometimes I have my fried egg for breakfast, rather than for dinner. And if I want to, I have two! (OK, so I haven’t had two in ages, but I can) Having three seems a bit much.