I have horses. My mom’s parents leased a horse farm and bred/raised/trained some nice Thoroughbreds and I had permission to ride the older horses when I was there. When Grandda had a stroke and died, Grandmum had to leave the farm. Since we were a blue collar family, we couldn’t afford lessons, much less a horse. When I moved and got married in 1994, it was only a few months before the hubby and I got our first horse. We have two now, our own little farm, and I’m so sorry my parents didn’t live to see it.
I never had jewelry as a kid. No jewelry on kids, that was the rule. Not even gum machine rings! I wasn’t allowed to even get my ears pierced until I was 18.
I have no idea why but I was obssessed with jewelry as a kid, and I still am. Except now I buy as much as I can. Good stuff and costume; it’s all good. Sometimes I get tired of some of the stuff I have, so I give it to friends. New jewelry to me is like a new love relationship. What a high! 
I try not to wear too much at once, but sometimes I wish I had like 20 fingers and two heads so I could wear more.
Yeah, baby. Jewelry!
Creaky, you made me laugh.
Mine is so much more mundane than those of you who sadly had to do without (who said “heat” upthread? I caught my breath when I read that!). 
But mine is knicknacks and and a bit of clutter. My mother was and still is a fabulous housekeeper, but she isn’t nostalgic and can’t stand clutter. “Out it goes!” is her motto, and while I admire the house that looks showplace-terrific at all times, I LOVE buying things that I can hear my mother saying, “that’ll just collect dust!”
When I opened my fancy new toaster oven recently (it’s a convection oven can you believe that?) my mother just clicked her tongue. “You and your brothers love those things; I have no idea why. They just clutter up the counter!”
I love my mother dearly but she created a packrat.
Hmm…most of what’s been mentioned in this thread has been “I didn’t have this, now I have this”. I was looking for overcompensation mainly, but carry on none-the-less.
Heh, heh. You know, I love clutter too! (Chinese porcelain and seashells and antique purses…!).
And especially kitchen stuff, I am so with you on that.
Like, I bought a food processor almost three years ago and I’ve never used it… but I had to have it, just to have it on the counter. I guess I’ll use it someday, but in the meantime it looks cool!!
Your oven sounds cool. That’s what I need, a really nice toaster oven!! 
To be perfectly fair, I’ve been places that’ve looked decent enough and we’ve left payment on the table for the waitress only to see some greaseball out of the corner of our eye attempt to reach over from the next booth and snag it. We had to run back and yank it off the table ourselves and put it right in his/her hand to make sure the meal got paid for so don’t beat yourself up about thinking that way. It actually DOES happen.
No need to read any further, this wins the thread.
It’s the opposite for me! My mother loves knicknacks and she has so much junk on all available surfaces that real, total cleaning is next to impossible. Unless you really want to polish all the little decorative glass bottles each time you want to wipe off the windowsill. I don’t own my own place yet, but I recently moved into the most streamlined, modern house I could find. There is no decoration in the entire place except for stuff hanging on the walls.
I’m not terribly neat, and my mother certainly isn’t a slob, but I love being able to do complete clean-ups relatively easily. I have realized, though, that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in a condo with beige walls and beige carpeting and no personalization at all. A few picture frames might be acceptable. 
Here is is and I love it deeply. I baked some pears in it last night for dessert while we were eating dinner. Mmmm mmmm!
Scissors:
When I was growing up, you could never cut a piece of paper in my house because there were never any scissors to be found. If a pair showed up, they were gone within a few days and the next pair wouldn’t show up for years. ** I learned how to cut paper without a scissors.** It’s quite do-able. I had to be good at it, because I went to Catholic school, and if you had to cut something, it’d better be straight. I’ve learned to crease paper very carefully, fold over, crease again and the run a sharp pencil through the crease, cutting the paper, then use a soft eraser too clean up the little bit of pencil that remained on the crease (now the end of the paper). Now I have two pairs of scissors in the kitchen, laundry room, and 3-4 pairs in the garage.
A hammer:
My dad never had an actual claw hammer. I have three large ones and several smaller versions
A screw driver:
Most butter knives in my childhood home were used for turning screws, and the tips were always bent.
I have every complete set of screwdriver needed, from Phillips and slotted, to Torx and Allen heads.
re: Scissors (I have to admit getting a bit teary-eyed writing the above. I just remember feeling very alone when I had to deal with that. It ain’t a problem worth mentioning in life, but when you are a kid and you can’t plead enough with you parents to FINALLY get a scissors in the house, you just wonder and go sit alone to work out the problem)
What was their problem with scissors? Did you parents feel they were too dangerous?
Travel. My parents, wonderful as they are, do not have any desire to see the world. Since getting married and becoming independent of them, my wife and I (with all of our kids, however many we have at the given time) have been to all 50 states and all 10 provinces of Canada, and we pretty much go as far away from home as we can whenever we have more than a few days off to spare. This summer, I arranged with my bosses for two weeks uninterrupted vacation during which we drove to Mount Rushmore and back.
Sweets. I used to whip up tiny batches of cookie dough when I was home in the afternoon, just to have something sweet to eat. Now that I’m an adult, I have a stack of chocolate bars in the pantry. I don’t eat any chocolate at all more days than I do, and when I do, it isn’t much… but just knowing it’s there is nice.
Also, sometimes buying things just on a whim, or just because I like them. I imagine that most kids feel that way–it’s so hard to get enough money to buy anything at all, that getting your first job and realizing that you have disposable income is a pretty powerful high.
Not at all. For whatever reason, they were never around. And if we asked, it’s not like anyone reacted by putting ‘scissors’ on a list of things to buy.
The great outdoors!
My parents were proto-hippie scholarly types. They were “active” but only in the sense of “not-sedintary”. So gardening and walking through the park was their thing. They were not at all “sporty”. Neither learned how to swim, in my entire life I’ve never seen either parent on a bicycle, and my dad actually even sucked at throwing a ball (but he’d watch football), so we used to play frisbee. Neither could skate, neither could ski.
My sister and I had a lot of opportunities to try things like skating lessons and swimming lessons, and we had bikes. But we never ever went camping. Not ONCE. No hiking either, just strolls through big landscaped parks with paved pathways. Any sport or swimming on open water was out of the question, so no canoeing.
As adults, my sister and I can’t get enough of the great outdoors: canoeing, kayaking, rock climbing, caving, backcountry wilderness camping, you name it! If you’re likely to run into Bigfoot, that’s where you’ll find us. Even when we get opportunities to go to places like Paris, we arrange the trip so we can climb quality rock in the Pyrennes.
Same here. The useful stuff was always gone in our home. I wasn’t as resourceful as you, I just made do with the only pair of scissors that no-one wanted to use so it was always there; a pair that made scallped edges when cutting. Either that one or the pair of nail scissors.
I now have scissors in every damned room of my house where I might be remotely likely to cut anything.
Another one for food that actually has flavor.
Growing up, dinner almost every night would be either chicken or steak with rice. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but my dad - who cooks - makes everything as tasteless as he possibly can because he doesn’t like any strong flavors.
Of course, no ethnic foods of any type found their way into my house, but in my parents’ defense we were living in a small-ish town in the midwest that didn’t have anything more exotic than the Olive Garden in it.
Fast forward to the present, when my favorite cuisines are Indian, Thai, and Vietnamese, and I use tons of garlic, onion, and spices when I cook for myself.
My parents also have this weird affinity for overly-processed and frozen food, so I can’t get enough of buying fresh vegetables and bread, fruit that doesn’t come out of a can, real butter, whole milk, and good cheese.
Butter. My mother has an irrational fear of butter. I think I ate every kind of butter substitute in production during my childhood. Now I have a pound in the fridge at any given moment.
My mother also has a thing about sweets, so I hoard chocolate. I don’t even eat it that often. I just like having a whole stack of chocolate bars and knowing that if the urge to eat an entire bar strikes, there’s nothing to stop me.
I thought you were going to link to this one. It also seems to fit the thread, in a way.
'Nother clothes/shoes/accessories person here. Oh, and books. It’s not that my parents wouldn’t buy me stuff, but I knew we didn’t have a lot of money, so I tried not to ask for much. Now I can’t help myself when it comes to pretty things.:smack: And books. :smack::smack: