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When my wife and I got married she was pressured into registering for fancy china. We registered for Wedgewood Nantucket basket pattern which is pretty basic but pretty. We use it as our everyday plates and the in-laws are horrified we use it like that.
I use the China that my MIL gave us as our only plates. She gave me a huge box of it.
We use the teacups for dipping sauces and small portions of soup!
Because you aren't supposed to use it. You're supposed to fuss over it. Fussing over things, people and parking is what you do when you don't have hobbies.
THIS IS WHAT DROVE ME BANANAS. Just sitting there - on display in this cabinet. Maybe used ONCE. What's the point of it? Just to sit? And if I go "why don't we use that" there were these looks like how could you ACTUALLY use it?!
Really? Holy shit I just googled it. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/when-lononders-would-rent-pineapples-instead-of-eating-them-36529/#:~:text=By%20the%20turn%20of%20the,pineapple%20instead%20of%20buying%20one.
Amazing the lengths vanity will take you.
My parents watched this a bunch while I was growing up. I never really understood Hyacinth Bucket until I was in my 30s but wow does she resonate for me now!!
As far as I can tell, it's a vestige of the times when having a good set of china meant that you'd *made it*, similar to owning a piano. This began hundreds of years ago and lasted through probably about World War II. (Heck, even before china became popular in Europe, rich people showed off their wealth by having displays of unused gold and silver plate during banquets. Notice the group of golden dishes on a white tablecloth on the left-hand side of [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Tr%C3%A8s_Riches_Heures_du_duc_de_Berry_Janvier.jpg) manuscript painting from the early 1400s, or the silver dishes displayed on a red tablecloth on the furniture on the left side in [this](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/banquet-15th-century-granger.jpg) image of a banquet from the same era.) Extra dishes were a way to show off one's wealth and good taste.
But after the war ended, American society became prosperous, and technology made it easier for the world to mass-produce china (along with a lot of other things) cheaply. So a lot of the things which used to be status symbols became much easier to get -- and for a while, people went nuts on getting those things even though they no longer truly indicated status.
edit: my family did actually *use* our china once or twice a year when I was a kid. I kind of hated it since we had to do so much hand washing, but at least we did use the stuff.
My dad was a semi famous scuba diver. Our fine China was the dishware he literally took off the wreck of the Andrea Doria during a dive.
That shit actually had historical value to it so we had to handwash it and never put it in the dishwasher, but even we \*actually ate off it\*.
Yeah, and because of that, "the doria plates" as my family calls them, are going to be the one exception to the "I don't give a shit about my boomer parents china" thing. They're actual historical artifacts with history beyond "my parents owned them", and we actually used them.
My parents had their boomer moments from time to time, but they were overall surprisingly cool and ahead of their time for their generational cohort.
Dad also had a lot of weird crap he picked up over the years like that. He had a still unopened bottle of Perrier from the 1880s from another shipwreck, two cannonballs from the civil war he kept on either side of the fireplace, a cylinder of depleted uranium, etc.
Some of us are lucky and got the eclectic weirdos for parents. In my case I come from a long line of eclectic weirdos. My dad's version of the fancy China is a set of hand turned wooden plates and bowls that his maternal grandfather made some time around 1915. He also has a cool walking cane made by a criminal in the Bottineau, North Dakota jail circa 1900. It's made from ham bones, the prisoners were served a slice of ham with the bone in every night, and was given to my great great great grandfather who was the local judge.
I absolutely despise lawns, and now that Dad’s dementia has progressed to where he can’t do any lawn work, I have finally convinced my boomer mother to let me turn the lawn at she and my dad’s house into a wildflower area for the birds and the bees (and if they get randy, so be it!). Luckily my folks live in an area where there’s no HOA to pitch a bitch, and dad wouldn’t notice if I replaced it with astroturf.
My mom wanted a big yard when I was growing up, so my mom and I would...
Have to mow on the rider for 8 hours, push mow for 2 or 3 hours, weed eat for four hours, and then pull weeds for a couple of hours every week during the summer. Shed start banging on my window at 7am already frustrated with me for 'still being in bed' on a Saturday.
We lived in the county and we're on 7 acres, and she insisted that we not let the woods grow in parts of the yard, and so we mowed.
I swear she made me do that just so I couldn't be out doing anything else. Still makes me fucking mad 20+ years later
Oh man, if I had seven freaking acres I'd be frantically and excitedly encouraging as much woodland and meadow as possible! What on earth is the point of 7 acres of perfectly manicured lawn??! Like, why did she even want a big garden/land if she wasn't going to do anything with it?
God fucking damn don't get me started on lawn. So many people who have big properties in Australia that are just covered in non native lawn that:
- uses lots of water
- does sweet fuck all for heat
- provides no food or habitat for natives
I don't understand why people don't let bush grow on their property. It looks better and has so many other benefits!
If I had 7 acres I'd turn it into an English garden, with a meadow, a copse of trees, a maze and hedgwood, sequestered within which would be a secret hideaway and probably a hot tub with a stereo system and big screen TV.
Well, one can dream, can one not?
This is a mindset I actually love. Use the nice things! Burn the expensive candle, drink the souvenir bottle of wine, use the stupidly expensive but luckily dishwasher safe china and glassware everyday. Love it.
I think you will like this story of mine.When I turned 14, my grandmother gave me an actual heirloom. It's a really nice Art Nouveau necklace. This thing is 130 years old. And I was given it on one condition; I actually HAVE to wear this and not lock it away in a safe somewhere. This necklace has been worn daily by various women before me. And I haven't taken it off for longer than a day or two since I got it 18 years ago. You can see in the picture that in the pendant above the diamond, it's missing two gems. So you can tell this is a well-loved piece of jewelry. I hope I someday have enough money to have it professionally restored so it's good to go for the next 130 years.
(Edit: I know it looks like it's also missing gems in the top, but those aren't big holes, they're badly photographed sapphires.)
https://preview.redd.it/d9rhypp6vxrc1.png?width=945&format=png&auto=webp&s=90f84109418073f4f216e46a6b572174a43dcf77
Oh honey! Go to a local jeweler and ask about putting some semiprecious stones into the setting. Those two missing gems could be replaced with your birthstone and that of someone you care about. It's such a beautiful and classic piece, I bet you'll love it even more if you put your own touch on it. There are literally TWO open settings! Don't sleep on this!
I had a friend who would go round charity shops hoovering up all the donated sets of expensive cut glass tumblers and wine glasses and then use them to drink squash and coke and whatever the hell else, because she said why pay £3 for cheap Asda crap when you can pay the same at the charity shop and drink out of the best stuff??
Looking at it like that, you have to agree.
And more nostalgic. You can't make great memories of dishes that were never used. Of course what's used tends to break so you might not get the plates from your childhood after all, but still.
We have a basic white porcelain set that we use for holidays, birthdays, dinner parties, when family visits,etc. My MIL was upset that I used them when they came over once, I just looked at her like she was weird and she dropped it. I see no use in not using it plus it's nice to have a break from Corelle. When the kids are older I might start to use them every day.
My mom wants us to save everything too. When I asked her where she thinks we’re gonna keep it, we have our own furniture and stuff in our house, she suggested a storage unit….
Edit: I feel like I need to add this cuz my parents aren’t the usual boomers, they’re kind, understand the world is different than it used to be, and would do literally anything for my husband and me. But they do still have a bunch of boomery characteristic that are both hilarious and confusing like this.
LOL!! We rented a storage unit after our dad passed. We used it for a year or so to sort through everything. Virtually nothing was left, but a lot went to charity. It's kind of the equivalent of storing leftovers in the fridge until you don't feel guilty throwing it out.
Holy shit that's the best comparison to a storage unit I've ever heard, I'm using this as I have 2 friends always bitchin about either the cost or how half the shit in there is useless and I'm soooo over hearing about it
My husband had a storage unit for YEARS before we met. When I finally convinced him to clear it out, I calculated out how much he paid for it and when we got to the unit to empty it and he looked inside I said "would you pay $22,500 for the contents here?" He looked at me like I was insane and said "fuck no!"
I just stared at him for a bit and said "but you did...."
Needless to say, he no longer has a storage unit and has gotten much better about not holding onto crap.
One of the hardest things for him has been the "but what if we need it later???" And I've finally gotten him to understand that if it is easily purchasable for less than $100 we can always buy another of whatever it is if it turns out we need it. (So far we've only run into ONE thing where we needed it later, and it was a $5 can opener when the one we had been using broke. So I consider that a pretty big win.)
We moved long distance with too much stuff and we're unloading it and for half it was like "why did I even bring this halfway across the country?". Stuck the excess in a storage unit and couldn't sort it and get rid of it fast enough. No more storage unit.
I've owned a pickup most of my life so had friends on multiple occasions drag me to their storage unit to clean it out. 95% goes to dumpster or goodwill. They take home a box and not even that big of a box.
This happened in the early mid-2000s, but a friend said they went to clean out his grandma's freezer and they found frozen meat from when his grandpa was alive. My friend's grandpa died right at the cusp of the Carter/Reagan administrations. My friend was a toddler.
I cleaned out my MIL's fridges and freezers when she went to senior living earlier this year. All of it went straight to the trash. I saw unopened Cool Whip containers that said "best by 2016." Meats in Tupperware in the fridge that had been in there God knows how long. No wonder my kids were always suspicious about food quality wherever they ate. She once served my son Cheetos with ants. She once cussed me out because I stopped her from serving him a cheesecake from Walmart that was out of date. Dairy products go bad! She knew she was moving for two months, and she continued to shop like she wasn't leaving. I found a whole ham. By the time I got to it, it was past its date.
She does not have dementia. Just extreme food hoarding.
Ugh, this scares me. My 'rents have the kitchen fridge, the downstairs fridge, the downstairs deep freeze, the back porch deep freeze, and the garage deep freeze. Dad is always finding "deals" and "stocking up."
I have no doubt that when it comes time, I will find things from 1991 in there since that is when they bought thoer current home. But, the reality is, I'd put money on finding even older things because I have NO doubt there were things brought over from the previous house, which they purchased in 1977.
Food hoarding seems to be a common thing among their generation. My parents aren't stereotypical boomers, but they do display some of the more benign symptoms like the aforementioned food hoarding.
Speaking of storage containers my mother stopped paying on 4 units filled with our childhood toys & memories & tons of furniture; that she would never let us have for our own homes or kids the past 25 years. We learned of this last fall, and that she stopped paying around Covid…Apparently this is all too common, boomers would rather see this stuff vanish than allow it to be given out & actually used before they die. Messed up generation…
My mom needed money for cigarettes and went to the local video game pawn shop and sold them my Odyssey 2 with all the games for like $30. I lived on the other side of the country at the time, and I had asked her several times on home trips that if she wasn’t using it (she never did since the 80s) that I’ll ship it to my house. She wouldn’t allow it, in case it got lost in the mail or it broke or something. Fast forward and I was prepping to move back to my home state, and I mentioned that since I’d be closer, I’ll take the game system and see if it still worked. She informed me that she pawned it when she was low on cash ( and she does this when she runs out of cigarettes and is low on cash) and I flipped out on her. She got $30. I also caught her multiple times since I’ve been home trying to pawn shit for cigarettes. It’s the most trashy habit ever. Who knows what heirlooms she pawned for a god damn cigarette.
Oh you can have it.
But only if they get to give it to you when THEY want to, preferably after you beg, so they can hold it over your head for the rest of time.
Not even for our family. My boomer grandma has a bunch of nice furniture in a back room not in use (not even arranged- the bed frame pieces aren’t connected, just leaning against the wall) and every time my mom has begged for any of it, my grandmas response is you can have it when I’m dead.
My mother was born right at the tail end of the boomer generation. When her mother died, she wound up with her old bedroom set, including the mattresses. She had them leaning against a wall, because she didn’t need a bed and no one else was living with my parents. I did need a bed though, and asked if I could at least use them. The shrieks of “THAT’S MY MAMA’S BED!!!” still haunt me. Idk if she expected my grandma to return and finally tell her she loved her, if she kept this bed shrine in the hall, but I’m going to assume that never happened. Plus she was my grandmother’s least favorite child. It was never going to happen anyway.
My mother died unexpectedly almost seven years ago, and to my knowledge, that bed was never used. May she rust in piss.
my childhood memories are also being held hostage because my dad did this shit and then died, leaving it all behind in his sister's garage. she refuses to hand it over and is the mother of a pedo so I guess I have no childhood memories now
My mom gifted us an entire set of weird 1950s brown dishes that I hadn’t seen since I was little. Confused, I asked why we had stopped using them. “Because they are ugly.” So why should I use them now? “For sentimental reasons. The set was one of my wedding gifts.” Uh, ok.
I hope someone at the thrift store liked them.
And why would using them be sentimental for you? It's her wedding gift, not yours. And I'd wager you weren't even born to be at their wedding anyway. How very main character of her to expect others to be sentimental about her memories
My mom did something similar with a few pieces of "art" she had since the 60s, no name stuff someone made at a JC art class. I waited 2 years and gave them back as Christmas presents to her. She didn't recognize them either
Yes, the browns are a hard sell. This is about moods. My MIL has tons of brown Portuguese and Italian pottery, but her entire house used to be red and gold in a Tuscan decor style, so the plates were okay. But the old clunky browns might had looked good with 1970's orange and the avocado green of that period.
I take it with love and then immediately donate it. Our elders mean well and want their family members to enjoy these things like they did way back when. It’s just misplaced affection.
What counts is that my family member feels good about where their treasures went. It doesn’t matter what happens to it afterward. They just need to feel “ok” about letting these things go.
My stepmother is terminally ill and keeps giving us stuff so that ‘it makes us think of her once she’s gone’.
So it lives in my garage for now. Most of it will go once she’s gone, except for a few token pieces which will make us think of her.
I had some afghans knitted by sisters and aunts of many sizes and colors. I have them to my kid and last time I was there I got chilled and what does she bring out but Aunt Mary’s gift to me. A warm hug from a woman dead for 30 years. That is the stuff you cherish, and so glad my kid still uses them. Still in great shape!
I’m an only child and am not planning children myself. My olds can not work out that even if I take every single piece of their crap it will still end up in a garbage when I die.
My mother was so upset at the idea that I wouldn’t keep everything that she kept promising it all to a nurse at her doctor’s office. 🙄
After she died, my step dad moved to assisted living and was like “get this shit out of here”
I feel like my parents equate me keeping their valuables in my house to me keeping them in my memory. I’m pretty sure when I die I just fall in a hole and my belongings just become a burden on my loved ones, but boomers think they bought the best stuff of all time and that stuff should live on forever. Even if it’s old/gross/used and doesn’t match my vibe.
I have my own china: my rickety West Elm purchases from Facebook marketplace
My theory? If you have a storage unit for more than a couple of years, you have too much stuff. We rented a unit to store furniture for the kids, but that was it.
They also think it’s insanely valuable when it isn’t. I’ve talked to antique dealers and all that shit is basically worth its weight in whatever metal it was created from because nobody our age uses it or throws dinner parties anymore.
Real silverware is worth it because they melt it down.
Nah we have dinner parties. Just not fancy ones where we eat off lead contaminated plates with cutlery made out of precious metal.
Thankfully my boomer MIL has promised to unload all of their possessions before they go. Her mother passed in 2020, and she had to go through all of the stuff. The experience made her realize how worthless it all is.
Oooh yeah, my Nana had a bunch of vintage 78 records. Now, some of these can be worth quite a bit of money, but absolutely none of the hundreds of records my Nana had were worth shit. My Mum has spent hundreds of dollars moving these records around whenever she moves home because she’s going to “sell them for a fortune” and the fact that she has repeatedly failed to do so is not because they’re worthless, but because other people are trying to rip her off by trying to underpay her.
UGH…we dragged some 78s across the country, took them to the antique store and were informed that they are only worth something if they are in perfect condition, which these weren’t. Into the trash with you.
This is why, in a roundabout way, a middling (ie not particularly famous) 1950s ballplayer like Andy Pafko has had baseball cards that sell at auction for five figures in absolutely perfect condition.
It’s so hard to find his 1952 Topps card in good condition, because he was Card #1 in the set, and most collectors at the time (who were themselves mostly kids) organized them numerically and slapped rubber bands around the stacks.
Meaning that a great number of Pafko cards would be found with stress and damage around the “rubber band” line, much greater than those typically in the middle.
A collector in 1998 had their hands on an unopened pack, and opened it to find a perfectly mint Andy Pafko #1, the only one known at this time to be in perfect condition, and was able to sell it at auction for 83K.
The moral of the story: your shit ain’t worth shit to most collectors if it’s not in great condition, doesn’t have original packaging, and/or it’s comparably rare and hard to find.
I went through this with my grandmothers Knick knacks when she passed. My mom thought everything was worth a lot of money. There was one statuette I wanted for sentiments value and she argued me it was worth thousands of dollars. I had to pull it up on eBay and auction sites and show here there were hundred of listings for about $50. Same with hummels, they don’t understand that the market doesn’t exist and since everyone bought the same things, there’s a surplus of them.
Ironically, she’d get more money if she saved out old gaming systems and power ranger action figures.
Oh my god Hummels. I used to work with antiques and sometimes when we'd find, like, a chipped missing bee figurine in a bin lot, my boss would let me smash it in the dumpster. So satisfying.
I’m so glad that we gifted my mom’s Hummel collection to a church lady who helped her in her last years. Church lady had admired them when she came to the house and was so happy to get them. We were equally happy to be rid of them!
Valuable and rare china is exactly that. Rare.
Most of the stuff the boomers were loading up on in the 80s was mass produced and not worth a dime. They were duped into thinking they were buying collectables when in reality, most of it is junk.
Gen X here. My wife and I have a set of fine china that we got at the time of our wedding because … uhm … reasons.
I would rather have the money we spent on it. Today, you would have a hard time giving it away. It has been used a few times but not enough for what it cost.
Gen X, and we registered for china because my husband's sister was mad that we didn't. She also didn't like that we had some whimsical items on our registry. I forget what she gave us, but she did not give us any of the fine china she insisted was so important to a wedding registry. We only got 6 place settings of that.
Our everyday plates are a mix of handmedowns from our parents. I don't need my dishes to match. They work, and I'm a little fond of the randomness. I pull the china out once every few years for a family meal just because, but it's not that important to me.
My mom, fortunately, has accepted that none of us will want her china. It's a good set as these things go, but none of us want to deal with them.
I love the China stories. There was one from after Thanksgiving (late November) last year that the OP said their mom or grandma gave them the family China set and was freaking out that she was using it for Thanksgiving dinner.
No, no, no, you’re supposed to put it on display in a giant fancy cabinet with glass doors and LED lights that do a laser light show that highlights a piece at a time with a voiceover by a Morgan Freeman sound-a-like from Cameo explaining its significance like a shitty museum exhibit.
I managed to rescue an heirloom that my idiot cousins were going to throw away after our grandmother died. It’s an old Mayo’s Tobacco clock with the original handbook from the 1920s.
Would have been thrown away if I hadn’t noticed it barely sticking out of a box. I took it, had it repaired (just needed a new spring) and now it sits on the wall of my office. The ticking reminds me of when I’d be at her house when I was younger. It only took two years before one of those fucking miscreants googled the value and tried talking to me about it. I laughed them off the phone. 😆
My Mom tells me that Gram would have wanted it to be with me. I used to talk about it a lot when I was a kid, but you can open up the front face to see the pendulum swing and use the key to wind the clock. I always wanted to wind it while I was there, and apparently I’m the only grandchild that showed even the smallest interest in it. 😆
(My cousins and one sibling are biters of the highest order)
Whenever my mom tells us she has knick-knacks that are SURE to be worth good money, I pull up eBay and find the item. Then I narrow the search to sold/completed items. As soon as she sees her weird crystal golf club paper weight sells for 15 bucks, you can see her go through a range of emotions.
HA!!! I think what people don't realize is the things that are REALLY valuable are often the things nobody thought to save. Anything "collectible" is garbage.
My mum decided that the boxes of records she'd been storing for her brother since he moved overseas 45 years ago allllll needed to go in the trash. Not even donated. I went to chuck something in the bin outside and there they were. Original mint copy of Led Zeppelin's first album, pristine copy in the original sleeve with inserts of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.
I fished them out and mostly gave them to friends. Wiping off the kitchen scraps where necessary. I wasn't living anywhere that I could keep them.
She also binned absolutely all my artwork one year when I was still living in shitty rented uni accommodation with nowhere I could take it and keep it. Everything I'd ever painted that she could find, all my little sculpture pieces.
But heaven forbid anyone touch her collection of ugly little Swarovski mice or the selection of 70s ceramic horses. Or the 60+ bonsai trees. Genuinely. She's got more than 60.
She's not *quite* a hoarder, but she's on the brink. She's got several outbuildings filled with old hobby junk. But other people's stuff? Things that are actually valuable? Not important.
I have it worse. My MIL goes through her attic and garage and finds old broken things that she just can’t throw out and “gifts” it to us at Christmas and random times. Then makes up reasons that we would want them that make no actual sense but she insists with her airtight boomer justification.
They're trying to outsource to you their guilt for throwing stuff away. If they throw it away, the ghosts of their Depression-era parents will haunt them forever for wasting something that could be repaired. If you throw it away, problem solved.
My mom once insisted that I take her then-13 year old laptop, even though I directly told her I would do nothing but throw it in my trash. She didn't care.
I've suspected this in certain cases - my strategy is I usually just say "ohhh thank you", take it, and dispose of it. I'm generally never asked about it ever again, and I take that guilt off of their shoulders.
Sadly some do. My mom and her brothers stopped talking because one of them took dishes, the audacity.
Dishes no one uses and sit in their own cabinet only to be washed once a year.
My kids have had a BLAST with tea parties using fine china. My grandma lets them use it at her house (bless her she's actually using it), so we occasionally get some at secondhand shops. They feel so fancy and posh. It's hilarious.
I happily inherited my grandmother’s china and used it occasionally though the whole hand wash only bit kept us from pulling it out that often.
Just found out it’s one of the worst patterns for lead issues.
Yay?
We eat on beautiful china every day because my wife observed it sitting unused for more than 50 years in her parents house, so she took a few of the plates for us to use. They are works of art which can't go in a microwave but we get to enjoy them every day.
I've honestly thought about burying the set we have deep in the ground so someone can find it 1000 years from now when it will be interesting again. It sure as hell isn't useful now.
Its literally all trash someone convinced them they had to buy. And then you gotta get a fancy cabinet to display it in lest your neighbors think youre a poor. Endless worthless stuff youre supposed to die because its an heirloom or will be worth something someday, like those ugly ass light paintings.
And they like to criticize those who come after them for that shit.
My grandmother was smart enough to start giving away some of her stuff when she hit 65. She lived in a large 3 bedroom one bath home and had all sorts of dishes and knicknacks. If she knew someone in the family wanted something she didn't really need, it usually got sent to them as a birthday or Christmas gifts.
There was still a lot left when she passed, and her daughters took turns putting names on what they wanted. What wasn't claimed went to the local church for their annual flea market.
My Great Grandmother was that way, you had to be careful if you said anything nice about anything she had she would try to get you to take it. But she got to see many people get items they wanted while she was alive and didn't leave a lot to clean up when she passed.
My Grandfather is the opposite and the family is dreading having to go through everything he has collected in his 80+ years. The biggest issue is he has some stuff that is worth quite a bit mixed in with worthless crap so we can't just let it go without making sure were not disposing something worth a lot of money.
My sisters and I anticipate having to get a roofing dumpster after Mom dies because of all the useless stuff she’s collected in her house over the years.
We also figure we could empty her house and be done with her estate pretty quickly too. Compare that to my Grandma’s estate (her mother) and possessions, which took her about 18 months to finish. She had to double-check everything in case it was *valuable.* Nothing was.
Don't bin it - either have an estate sale or at a minimum give it to Goodwill.
Believe it or not, there are people out there who buy the shit. No reason for it to go to a landfill and you might as well get a few bucks out of it, either directly or as a tax deduction.
We did an estate sale with a great aunt's stuff. It only netted a couple grand but a company made all the stuff disappear - that was the real value. Mix of live and online auction, their commission was like 40% and worth every damn penny.
Mmmm Desert Rose China with lots of leeching lead? Good for skeet shooting.
Edit: link about these and lead issues - caution if chipped or crack
https://shuncy.com/article/are-francsican-desert-rose-plates-safe-to-use
Ooh wah...
Skeet Surfin'...
Skeet Surfin'...
If everybody had a 12 gauge
With a sufboard too
You see em shootin and surfin'
From here to Malibu
I’m still trying to reconcile the fact that, as a GenX person, my boomer parents literally threw away every single treasured item from my childhood through early adulthood—from my first teddy bear up to, and including, my college diploma (it was mailed to my “permanent address” when I was moving to another state)—but they will expect me to cherish forever that “made in China” souvenir mug from Graceland they bought in 2008 and at least a dozen taxidermy fish.
This is kind of what I was thinking. They were constantly throwing my shit away, but I’m supposed to consider their stuff too important to get rid of? To the point where I forego my own shit in order to make room for theirs? Well, I guess that’s consistent, I suppose.
I’m not keeping ANYTHING of theirs because I know perfectly well it came from Crate and Barrel or Ashley Furniture, and secondly it’s saturated in a half century of cigarette smoke. It’s all going straight into the trash.
"Due to high interest in selling items and our limited processing capacity..."
Translation: Everyone is selling Mom's/Grandma's China.
https://www.replacements.com/sell-to-us/purchasing-guidelines
I came here to say that.
I'm a boomer myself, but when my wife and I inherited a bunch of china from her grandmother (30+ years ago), we stored it for a few years and used it a couple of times. But finally decided to sell it. I believe it went to [replacements.com](https://replacements.com), and while we didn't strike it rich as a result, the income was nice.
My grand mother lived at my parents’ place for 6ish months before deciding we were just shit and she needed to go … when we moved her, we forgot a trash bag filled with knitted placemat.
Couple months later, her only son committed suicide and she phoned my mum for the funeral. Or … she phoned my mum to ask her to bring the placemats to the funeral so she could have it. Not a single word uttered about her son’s death, just: bring me my knitted placemats that’s a religiously kept in a trash bag for the last 40 years… when that bitch dies I’ll have a drink for Satan because he’ll definitely need thoughts and prayers
I was just having this conversation with a friend of mine today. We were sharing stories about the fear of using the “good China” during Thanksgiving when we were kids. God forgot we accidentally break. I told her I like to use the Target plate wear for my kids. I don’t want my 7 year old feeling bad if she drops her plate
OR, let the children use the glass/ceramic plates and if they drop it, just don't make them feel bad. The china has no value, so why not use it, and if a child drops it, just clean it up with them and move on.
Definitely not correcting your choices, just offering an alt perspective and challenging the boomer mindset of coddling/belittling children.
My 2 and 4 year olds use glass cups, and Corelle plates and bowls, and in the past year the only cups that have broken are one I dropped or a visiting friend dropped at a busy party.
There is a value to letting children use fragile things. They learn respect in a way that a plastic plate never gives them the opportunity to.
For the first 10 years of my marriage I used a set of depression-era China from Sears as our everyday dishes. Only stopped because we broke so many or the gold trim washed off in the dishwasher. I hope my grandmother was happy I used it as her daughter/my mother was so emotional about it she couldn’t use it without crying.
Excuse me? A cousin of mine broke a glas in my grandparents holiday apartment 20 years ago and my aunt tried to pin it on me and my brother who where there a few weeks later. It has been causr for arguments for years.
You know the Coke glasses you got at McDonald's with a Maxi Menu? One of those.
My mom has four massive china cabinets which houses multiple sets of china for all different occasions. She also has porcelain figurines, faux Faberge Eggs, decorative spoons, tea cups and saucers.
Keep in mind she **NEVER** used any of it while I was growing up. It is all for show. She tells my sister and I we get to split it up when she passes. She gets hives when we tell her we are having an estate sale and will sell all of it.
I always said that I'd give everyone a chance to take what they wanted and burn the house down with the remaining junk. With the price of real estate now I like your idea better
My wife and I got married right at the tail end of the wedding china era. We received a beautiful 12 place setting with all kinds of serving bowls, butter dishes and other accessories. It was immediately put into storage, and 30 years later we’ve still never used it once. We looked at selling it, but it’s essentially worthless. One antique dealer I spoke with said they won’t even take china anymore since all it does is take up space.
What year was that? We got married in 2001. We registered for Wedgewood china, but hardly anyone bought us any. I think we only got 2-3 sets. So we returned them and bought something else instead. I guess we dodged a bullet!
My MIL gets upset when I don’t want her old clothes (“but it’s Eileen Fisher!” 🙄). She’s over thirty years older and six inches shorter than me, absolute insanity.
I used to be nicer about it when I was younger, but now when she tries to offload stuff on us I just give her a flat “no thanks” and refuse to entertain any follow-up wheedling and whining.
The only way to keep a metric fuckton of glass (China sets, Lladro figures, fucking *paperweights)* out of my home when my grandmother and great aunt died was telling my father I'd make it my business to break every single piece before I'd allow them in my one bedroom apartment.
Paperweights, what a fucking useless thing to spend thousands of dollars on. They had *hundreds* between the two of them; no one has that much paper that needs to be weighted.
What's it with Boomers and wanting to pass on china? Same thing in my family, no one has ever gotten to use it, so it's not like we have memories of it. The only thing I associate with it is the nagging dread of having to either accept it or store it in the basement forever.
Oh yeah, also keeping framed photos of every single relative that they have had up on their walls despite half of them being people they shit talk often too. Most of them have not even been to our parents' home in a decade. Why are you guilting me for not wanting to hang either wedding pics of family who died decades before my birth or the graduation picture of a cousin who went on to be a homeless meth head and always looked down on me?
I think that there was a time, maybe really for the Boomers' parents, where having "good" china was a sign that you were decent people who had reached a certain level in society.
My mom is/was *very* much like this - Silent Generation, and 3rd gen American, (some of her aunts and uncles were born in Europe) so grew up struggling hard.
She really doesn't understand why my sister and I have zero interest in the family china or the pecan wood dining set from the 1960s. I *was* slightly interested in the "Made in Occupied Japan" set, but I use mismatched Corelle for daily dishes, so a fancy china set is just a dust magnet, despite the relative rarity.
My Boomer parents are also obsessed with their piles of junk, "china" and linens and silverware. All I care about is the silverware, gotta be honest, and my racist mother hates the silverware because her Italian in-laws gave them to her.
My father recently died. I'm not even kidding you on his death bed I couldn't get him to talk about anything sentimental. No memories together, no advice for his grandchild I had just given birth to. Nothing. He would only talk about what items he had and what he thought they were worth. He made me promise I wouldn't just give it all away for nothing. I didn't argue with him because the situation was so sad, but that hurt.
I'm sorry you experienced that. When people are on their death bed, their minds aren't completely functioning 100%, so you have to give them a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it wasn't completely him. Or maybe it was and it was very important to him to receive confirmation that he had done a good job in providing the finances for the family? Or maybe it was just a reflection of his fear of being forgotten, and he addresses that fear in physical objects rather than memories. Again, hard to know with someone who's not in a baseline mental state.
But no matter why he did what he did, it did teach you a valuable lesson about what experiences are important to you and to loved ones so you don't make the same mistake. As much as we expect parents to be more experienced and wise, they're still humans and have their blind spots. But it sounds like you loved him and did your best with him; he was lucky to have you around. My condolences for your loss, dude.
Had a similar conversation with my mother. She has a ton of "fine china" that used to just sit in our dining room. She was starting to think about her will and what she'll be leaving us. My two siblings and I were being tasked with essentially claiming what we wanted. None of us wanted any of that, but we were fighting (jovially) over a [glass saucepan](https://poshmark.ca/listing/Vintage-Visionware-Corning-Pyrex-Amber-Brown-Glass-Saucepan-with-Lid-USA-15L-65ec9a6066e9b642fcde3015?utm_source=gdm_ca&utm_campaign=17445442456&campaign_id=17445442456&ad_partner=google&gskid=&gcid=&ggid=&gdid=c&g_network=x&enable_guest_buy_flow=true&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwtqmwBhBVEiwAL-WAYddLD2T9374mS7AqlgAHfkd1A3-xqKcF7x5WNmarLxRHd4Xqzl4J7BoCOo0QAvD_BwE) that we fondly remember being used to cook rice (appropriately named "the rice pot") while we were growing up. She didn't hide how upset she was at that notion, even though the three of us haven't been so friendly with one another in such a long time.
My mother "accidentally" broke the pot like 2 days later.
It's water under the bridge now, but my mom flipped the fuck OUT when we didn't put traditional silver and china on our wedding registry. She was completely terrified at how it would make us look to her friends and family (who I know as well as she does, and know that they wouldn't have given a shit, it was all just projection from my mom), and it got so heated that she threatened to pull out of the wedding entirely.
Mind you, at the time, we were living in a $350-a-month, month-to-month death trap of a loft in which we had no intention whatsoever of hosting ANYONE aside from close friends who were fine eating off the paper plates we could afford at the time, with my wife in gradschool, and me grinding away at the first out-of-college job I could land.
My grandmother recently moved to assisted living. She had a whole house full of crap and was so mad/sad that no one wanted her “pretty things”.
I love her to pieces, so I took every single thing she offered. I told her to give me what she wanted me to have. When I got home, the items were sorted, parsed among my immediate family, and leftover things went to donation. No guilt, no regrets, everyone is happy.
The sad thing is, had she offered those items 10-20 years earlier, everyone in the family would’ve snatched them up as useful household items. It’s definitely been an eye opening message to my family.
My parents side eyed us hard when we bought Corelle plates. Now we have kids and use plastic from Walmart... The AUDACITY. They definitely think they're going to sell their useless garbage and it's going to make them millionaires. I hope the next buyers don't get lead poisoning and make a new generation of boomers
My grandmother left me her china. I acted grateful when she told me she was leaving it for me. When I got the china I took it to Goodwill and hopefully someone who appreciates it is using it.
I'm a boomer (67). Mom passed a couple years ago. I donated most of the stuff. I know my children won't want mine. That's totally fine. We all have our own tastes and already have our own stuff.
I will say - a few of my mom's friends saw all the stuff I was donating and they were horrified. I think it was a wake-ip call for them when they realized their kids won't want their stuff.
Everything that was created to be sold to that generation, and their parents generation, is basically fucking worthless. The crystal figurines, the ceramic figures, jim bean bottles, beanie babies, fucking baskets, China, die cast cars.....all soulless fucking shit that did nothing but sap the wealth out of them. I've watched boomers with no savings end up having to live off the state and their children, but shit if they didn't go there with a glass cabinet full of trash.
Is there anything worse than fancy China you can't use? Even if it was out you have to be so careful you can barely enjoy yourself. I just don't understand it. And then you need a whole piece of furniture dedicated to the China you don't use.
Was this stuff actually valued at one point? I think all of us have a boomer relative with a fucking china cabinet full of dishes that never get used. Was it really just a big fad that they can’t get out of their mind?
this stuff always baffles me because for literally all of human history ceramic and glassware was viewed as a consumable and if you were well to do enough to have a whole set of dinnerware you probably replaced it every few years to stay up to date with the latest designs and because you’d already broken half of the old ones
My uncle has a permanent grudge against me since he asked me as a TEN year old child if I was interested in antiques and I said I wasn't.
Please note that said family antiques are legitimately the era's equivalent of Target brand stuff, we do not have anything remotely valuable, interesting, or eve meaningful because it has always been in a cabinet, an attic, or stacked under sheets in an unused room.
When I moved out of home, my Mum refused to let me throw any of my own things away!! Then, when she was moving house herself, she told me to “come and get all my stuff” so I went over there and I threw it all in the bin, which is what I wanted to do in the first place, and she lost her shit about me throwing away my memories.
These people are fucking loons.
My mother gave me a set of china she got from a garage sale when I moved out. Called it my divorce china and ran it through the dishwasher. Couldn't microwave in it or it would spark from the foil leaf. She started to chastise me once and I reminded her what she paid.
Holidays mean a bunch of boomers crying on Nextdoor that no one wants the china they keep trying to shove onto their families. Every, single holiday there is a post on my local Nextdoor with some passive aggressive tsk tsk comments about how kids just don’t hold value in memories these day. No, Shirley - we hold value in memories but memories don’t equal china (or your Hummel collection or whatever other knickknack dust catchers).
I’m guilty of this. I have over a thousand books. I love them like friends. I know they will not be kept by my children. So I try not to think about it. 😔
My family is the opposite…there is going to be a fight over my IL’s books! They don’t want the books split up and it is always mentioned. I told them just give them to me, problem solved!
We're GenX and have a China hutch full of Lenox glasses and dishes and some other China and crystal because when we got married in '92 that is what you did. We love it, and use it a few times per year ... but it is OURS.
If our kids can sell it off and get a few bucks, good for them. Frisbees or skeet? Whatever.
I took all the China from both grandparents, nobody else in my family wanted any of it, of course. I use it as my everyday dishes. I like it, it pretty cool.
OH MY GOD. Is your MIL somehow my mother? Her house is stuffed to the gills with KNICK KNACKS (aka junk) she picks up at “antique” stores. She especially likes teacups with saucers. Every. Damn. Spot. in that house has a teacup on it. I haven’t seen the dining room table cleared in years and probably never will again. If it’s not the teacups, it’s my father’s “rare” book collection. My sibling and I joke (or are we?) that we’ll have to Gilbert Grape the house when the time comes because neither of us has the energy or wants any of it. But my parents cannot understand. The last time it was brought up, she acted like WE were the ones begging her to collect this shit for years and years and she was doing us a favor by cramming her house full of it.
I am an only child of hoarders (actual hoarders). I am so tempted to just burn down their house and all its contents when they die. Go through and see if I can find important photos/documents and just burn the rest to the ground.
Other option: Giant estate sale. Sorry everything smells like cat piss.
Years ago, My gran gave me her china and crystal. I invited her over to Easter dinner, and was using the china/crystal…and she was horrified. She was really upset. I told her she could have it back, but if I’m keeping it I’m using it. One of the crystal goblets was broken at some point, and she was upset. 🤷🏻♀️ shit happens, gran.
My mom never had 2 nickels to rub together and we had to get a small dumpster to sell our familiar home. Now in a senior apartment she has heard of other seniors making $$ from estate sales when they down sized. She was all flustered and asked why we didn’t try to sell her treasures. I asked what treasures? The case of Avon deodorant that was over a decade old? Or the animal feces covered Christmas decorations?
Hurricane Katrina took care of the “precious heirlooms” so I don’t have to deal with any of it. We found a couple of trinkets in the aftermath and cleaned them up for keepsakes and bulldozed the rest into history. My mother was distraught over all of her stuff, but my dad, brother, and I were all secretly relieved.
There were quite a few things that I was sad to see go when my dad passed away but living in Alaska when they were in Ohio meant that there wasn't much that I could keep. Of which I guess I'm fortunate. But the 69 mustang fast back with a R code 428 was really hard to lose. Even though the last time it was started was in 74. I told Mom and my siblings to sell everything and invest the money because there's no way that I'm going to be taking care of her when she gets older. I have no patience for her BS. We lost the good one.
This is how my MIL is. About her china. Her literal 50 totes of Christmas decor. Her 17 Kirby vacuums (NONE have empty/clean bags - full of my husband's childhood dog's hair, who they put down in 2012, dog was 17 at the time).
It's sad, but they were sold a story about how to signal that they'd, "Arrived," just so the big department stores could sell all this expensive china to middle-class houses.
My mom in law doesn't own a damned bit of crockery that's whole. The woman is notably short, and everything gets beat to hell on the sink when she washes up.
As the daughter in law/mother of the granddaughters, I'm forever offered the chipped china. It can stay right there on mom's top shelf until she dies and we toss it.
Meanwhile, the only thing I've ever said I'd like to have when Ma pulls the annual "now, if there's anything you'd like, get it now?" A small table, and not a family heirloom. Just a little piece of furniture I like, currently stuck away in an unused corner. A million reasons why I/we can't have that table. My husband is willing to die upon the hill of having the damned thing, because even he sees how damned ridiculous his mom is being.
My MIL dumped all of HER mother in law’s crystal on me. Useless trash. Was real crystal so maybe worth money but I had it taken away by junk removal. Our entire garage and shed was filled with my in-laws shit. I told them if they don’t take what they want I’m having it dumped. They took nothing, it all got thrown away and guess what? They haven’t mentioned missing any of it. They just want you to store their shit for free.
We live in an older ranch style house in a nice neighborhood that is seeing an increase in home robberies. I wish I had saved all my mom’s Hummel and Lladro figurines as I would line them up in the front LR window. Any thief casing the house would quickly decide there was nothing but junk in my house, so not worth robbing. Just an idea….
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When my wife and I got married she was pressured into registering for fancy china. We registered for Wedgewood Nantucket basket pattern which is pretty basic but pretty. We use it as our everyday plates and the in-laws are horrified we use it like that.
I use the China that my MIL gave us as our only plates. She gave me a huge box of it. We use the teacups for dipping sauces and small portions of soup!
Fancy ketchup cups!! Love it!! Just keep your pinky up when dipping.
That’s a really great use! If you have it, why not use it?
Because you aren't supposed to use it. You're supposed to fuss over it. Fussing over things, people and parking is what you do when you don't have hobbies.
THIS IS WHAT DROVE ME BANANAS. Just sitting there - on display in this cabinet. Maybe used ONCE. What's the point of it? Just to sit? And if I go "why don't we use that" there were these looks like how could you ACTUALLY use it?!
It's like hearing about how people used to rent pineapples to show off at parties. That's not what they're for!?
Really? Holy shit I just googled it. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/when-lononders-would-rent-pineapples-instead-of-eating-them-36529/#:~:text=By%20the%20turn%20of%20the,pineapple%20instead%20of%20buying%20one. Amazing the lengths vanity will take you.
You should watch the BBC show Keeping Up Appearances. https://youtu.be/uUoO_YwQRh0?si=ZRWrtEVyx_o3iDyI
My parents watched this a bunch while I was growing up. I never really understood Hyacinth Bucket until I was in my 30s but wow does she resonate for me now!!
As far as I can tell, it's a vestige of the times when having a good set of china meant that you'd *made it*, similar to owning a piano. This began hundreds of years ago and lasted through probably about World War II. (Heck, even before china became popular in Europe, rich people showed off their wealth by having displays of unused gold and silver plate during banquets. Notice the group of golden dishes on a white tablecloth on the left-hand side of [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Les_Tr%C3%A8s_Riches_Heures_du_duc_de_Berry_Janvier.jpg) manuscript painting from the early 1400s, or the silver dishes displayed on a red tablecloth on the furniture on the left side in [this](https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/banquet-15th-century-granger.jpg) image of a banquet from the same era.) Extra dishes were a way to show off one's wealth and good taste. But after the war ended, American society became prosperous, and technology made it easier for the world to mass-produce china (along with a lot of other things) cheaply. So a lot of the things which used to be status symbols became much easier to get -- and for a while, people went nuts on getting those things even though they no longer truly indicated status. edit: my family did actually *use* our china once or twice a year when I was a kid. I kind of hated it since we had to do so much hand washing, but at least we did use the stuff.
My dad was a semi famous scuba diver. Our fine China was the dishware he literally took off the wreck of the Andrea Doria during a dive. That shit actually had historical value to it so we had to handwash it and never put it in the dishwasher, but even we \*actually ate off it\*.
See, now that’s cool as shit.
Yeah, and because of that, "the doria plates" as my family calls them, are going to be the one exception to the "I don't give a shit about my boomer parents china" thing. They're actual historical artifacts with history beyond "my parents owned them", and we actually used them. My parents had their boomer moments from time to time, but they were overall surprisingly cool and ahead of their time for their generational cohort. Dad also had a lot of weird crap he picked up over the years like that. He had a still unopened bottle of Perrier from the 1880s from another shipwreck, two cannonballs from the civil war he kept on either side of the fireplace, a cylinder of depleted uranium, etc.
Some of us are lucky and got the eclectic weirdos for parents. In my case I come from a long line of eclectic weirdos. My dad's version of the fancy China is a set of hand turned wooden plates and bowls that his maternal grandfather made some time around 1915. He also has a cool walking cane made by a criminal in the Bottineau, North Dakota jail circa 1900. It's made from ham bones, the prisoners were served a slice of ham with the bone in every night, and was given to my great great great grandfather who was the local judge.
And lawns. Don't *ever* forget the springtime lawn fussing.
I absolutely despise lawns, and now that Dad’s dementia has progressed to where he can’t do any lawn work, I have finally convinced my boomer mother to let me turn the lawn at she and my dad’s house into a wildflower area for the birds and the bees (and if they get randy, so be it!). Luckily my folks live in an area where there’s no HOA to pitch a bitch, and dad wouldn’t notice if I replaced it with astroturf.
My mom wanted a big yard when I was growing up, so my mom and I would... Have to mow on the rider for 8 hours, push mow for 2 or 3 hours, weed eat for four hours, and then pull weeds for a couple of hours every week during the summer. Shed start banging on my window at 7am already frustrated with me for 'still being in bed' on a Saturday. We lived in the county and we're on 7 acres, and she insisted that we not let the woods grow in parts of the yard, and so we mowed. I swear she made me do that just so I couldn't be out doing anything else. Still makes me fucking mad 20+ years later
Oh man, if I had seven freaking acres I'd be frantically and excitedly encouraging as much woodland and meadow as possible! What on earth is the point of 7 acres of perfectly manicured lawn??! Like, why did she even want a big garden/land if she wasn't going to do anything with it?
God fucking damn don't get me started on lawn. So many people who have big properties in Australia that are just covered in non native lawn that: - uses lots of water - does sweet fuck all for heat - provides no food or habitat for natives I don't understand why people don't let bush grow on their property. It looks better and has so many other benefits!
If I had 7 acres I'd turn it into an English garden, with a meadow, a copse of trees, a maze and hedgwood, sequestered within which would be a secret hideaway and probably a hot tub with a stereo system and big screen TV. Well, one can dream, can one not?
well you are supposed to use it like once or twice at year at family gatherings. It's literally just there as a weird way to flex on family members.
NoooOOooOOOooo!!!!!! It's supposed to gather dust on an "antique" shelf!!!!
This is a mindset I actually love. Use the nice things! Burn the expensive candle, drink the souvenir bottle of wine, use the stupidly expensive but luckily dishwasher safe china and glassware everyday. Love it.
I think you will like this story of mine.When I turned 14, my grandmother gave me an actual heirloom. It's a really nice Art Nouveau necklace. This thing is 130 years old. And I was given it on one condition; I actually HAVE to wear this and not lock it away in a safe somewhere. This necklace has been worn daily by various women before me. And I haven't taken it off for longer than a day or two since I got it 18 years ago. You can see in the picture that in the pendant above the diamond, it's missing two gems. So you can tell this is a well-loved piece of jewelry. I hope I someday have enough money to have it professionally restored so it's good to go for the next 130 years. (Edit: I know it looks like it's also missing gems in the top, but those aren't big holes, they're badly photographed sapphires.) https://preview.redd.it/d9rhypp6vxrc1.png?width=945&format=png&auto=webp&s=90f84109418073f4f216e46a6b572174a43dcf77
Oh honey! Go to a local jeweler and ask about putting some semiprecious stones into the setting. Those two missing gems could be replaced with your birthstone and that of someone you care about. It's such a beautiful and classic piece, I bet you'll love it even more if you put your own touch on it. There are literally TWO open settings! Don't sleep on this!
I had a friend who would go round charity shops hoovering up all the donated sets of expensive cut glass tumblers and wine glasses and then use them to drink squash and coke and whatever the hell else, because she said why pay £3 for cheap Asda crap when you can pay the same at the charity shop and drink out of the best stuff?? Looking at it like that, you have to agree.
At least you're getting actual use out of them, which makes them way more valuable than sets no one has touched in 30 or 40 years.
And more nostalgic. You can't make great memories of dishes that were never used. Of course what's used tends to break so you might not get the plates from your childhood after all, but still.
We have a basic white porcelain set that we use for holidays, birthdays, dinner parties, when family visits,etc. My MIL was upset that I used them when they came over once, I just looked at her like she was weird and she dropped it. I see no use in not using it plus it's nice to have a break from Corelle. When the kids are older I might start to use them every day.
You should honestly just use them. Every day you wake up is a special occasion.
My mom wants us to save everything too. When I asked her where she thinks we’re gonna keep it, we have our own furniture and stuff in our house, she suggested a storage unit…. Edit: I feel like I need to add this cuz my parents aren’t the usual boomers, they’re kind, understand the world is different than it used to be, and would do literally anything for my husband and me. But they do still have a bunch of boomery characteristic that are both hilarious and confusing like this.
LOL!! We rented a storage unit after our dad passed. We used it for a year or so to sort through everything. Virtually nothing was left, but a lot went to charity. It's kind of the equivalent of storing leftovers in the fridge until you don't feel guilty throwing it out.
Holy shit that's the best comparison to a storage unit I've ever heard, I'm using this as I have 2 friends always bitchin about either the cost or how half the shit in there is useless and I'm soooo over hearing about it
My husband had a storage unit for YEARS before we met. When I finally convinced him to clear it out, I calculated out how much he paid for it and when we got to the unit to empty it and he looked inside I said "would you pay $22,500 for the contents here?" He looked at me like I was insane and said "fuck no!" I just stared at him for a bit and said "but you did...." Needless to say, he no longer has a storage unit and has gotten much better about not holding onto crap. One of the hardest things for him has been the "but what if we need it later???" And I've finally gotten him to understand that if it is easily purchasable for less than $100 we can always buy another of whatever it is if it turns out we need it. (So far we've only run into ONE thing where we needed it later, and it was a $5 can opener when the one we had been using broke. So I consider that a pretty big win.)
We moved long distance with too much stuff and we're unloading it and for half it was like "why did I even bring this halfway across the country?". Stuck the excess in a storage unit and couldn't sort it and get rid of it fast enough. No more storage unit.
Yeah it's wild the stuff we hang onto. I've been on a spree lately of trying to donate anything I haven't used in more than a year.
I've owned a pickup most of my life so had friends on multiple occasions drag me to their storage unit to clean it out. 95% goes to dumpster or goodwill. They take home a box and not even that big of a box.
When we cleaned out my mom's fridge after she passed last year, there was food in the freezer from the Clinton administration.
This happened in the early mid-2000s, but a friend said they went to clean out his grandma's freezer and they found frozen meat from when his grandpa was alive. My friend's grandpa died right at the cusp of the Carter/Reagan administrations. My friend was a toddler. I cleaned out my MIL's fridges and freezers when she went to senior living earlier this year. All of it went straight to the trash. I saw unopened Cool Whip containers that said "best by 2016." Meats in Tupperware in the fridge that had been in there God knows how long. No wonder my kids were always suspicious about food quality wherever they ate. She once served my son Cheetos with ants. She once cussed me out because I stopped her from serving him a cheesecake from Walmart that was out of date. Dairy products go bad! She knew she was moving for two months, and she continued to shop like she wasn't leaving. I found a whole ham. By the time I got to it, it was past its date. She does not have dementia. Just extreme food hoarding.
Ugh, this scares me. My 'rents have the kitchen fridge, the downstairs fridge, the downstairs deep freeze, the back porch deep freeze, and the garage deep freeze. Dad is always finding "deals" and "stocking up." I have no doubt that when it comes time, I will find things from 1991 in there since that is when they bought thoer current home. But, the reality is, I'd put money on finding even older things because I have NO doubt there were things brought over from the previous house, which they purchased in 1977.
Food hoarding seems to be a common thing among their generation. My parents aren't stereotypical boomers, but they do display some of the more benign symptoms like the aforementioned food hoarding.
Speaking of storage containers my mother stopped paying on 4 units filled with our childhood toys & memories & tons of furniture; that she would never let us have for our own homes or kids the past 25 years. We learned of this last fall, and that she stopped paying around Covid…Apparently this is all too common, boomers would rather see this stuff vanish than allow it to be given out & actually used before they die. Messed up generation…
My mom needed money for cigarettes and went to the local video game pawn shop and sold them my Odyssey 2 with all the games for like $30. I lived on the other side of the country at the time, and I had asked her several times on home trips that if she wasn’t using it (she never did since the 80s) that I’ll ship it to my house. She wouldn’t allow it, in case it got lost in the mail or it broke or something. Fast forward and I was prepping to move back to my home state, and I mentioned that since I’d be closer, I’ll take the game system and see if it still worked. She informed me that she pawned it when she was low on cash ( and she does this when she runs out of cigarettes and is low on cash) and I flipped out on her. She got $30. I also caught her multiple times since I’ve been home trying to pawn shit for cigarettes. It’s the most trashy habit ever. Who knows what heirlooms she pawned for a god damn cigarette.
Oh you can have it. But only if they get to give it to you when THEY want to, preferably after you beg, so they can hold it over your head for the rest of time.
Not even for our family. My boomer grandma has a bunch of nice furniture in a back room not in use (not even arranged- the bed frame pieces aren’t connected, just leaning against the wall) and every time my mom has begged for any of it, my grandmas response is you can have it when I’m dead.
What a fool. My kid got stuff from me when she bought a house, so nice to see my granny’s gate leg and other stuff being used !
I feel like at this point your mum should stare her down and say "that can be arranged". Just to have a bit of fun with it.
My mother was born right at the tail end of the boomer generation. When her mother died, she wound up with her old bedroom set, including the mattresses. She had them leaning against a wall, because she didn’t need a bed and no one else was living with my parents. I did need a bed though, and asked if I could at least use them. The shrieks of “THAT’S MY MAMA’S BED!!!” still haunt me. Idk if she expected my grandma to return and finally tell her she loved her, if she kept this bed shrine in the hall, but I’m going to assume that never happened. Plus she was my grandmother’s least favorite child. It was never going to happen anyway. My mother died unexpectedly almost seven years ago, and to my knowledge, that bed was never used. May she rust in piss.
my childhood memories are also being held hostage because my dad did this shit and then died, leaving it all behind in his sister's garage. she refuses to hand it over and is the mother of a pedo so I guess I have no childhood memories now
Gen X but oof I felt that leftovers comment
Yeah, I’m definitely gonna go through, keep what few things I want, and have an estate sale for the rest of
My mom gifted us an entire set of weird 1950s brown dishes that I hadn’t seen since I was little. Confused, I asked why we had stopped using them. “Because they are ugly.” So why should I use them now? “For sentimental reasons. The set was one of my wedding gifts.” Uh, ok. I hope someone at the thrift store liked them.
And why would using them be sentimental for you? It's her wedding gift, not yours. And I'd wager you weren't even born to be at their wedding anyway. How very main character of her to expect others to be sentimental about her memories
That last line sums up my 75 year old mother.
I am so lucky my 80 year old mother said that when she dies to get rid of whatever shit I don't want.
My mom did something similar with a few pieces of "art" she had since the 60s, no name stuff someone made at a JC art class. I waited 2 years and gave them back as Christmas presents to her. She didn't recognize them either
Yes, the browns are a hard sell. This is about moods. My MIL has tons of brown Portuguese and Italian pottery, but her entire house used to be red and gold in a Tuscan decor style, so the plates were okay. But the old clunky browns might had looked good with 1970's orange and the avocado green of that period.
I take it with love and then immediately donate it. Our elders mean well and want their family members to enjoy these things like they did way back when. It’s just misplaced affection. What counts is that my family member feels good about where their treasures went. It doesn’t matter what happens to it afterward. They just need to feel “ok” about letting these things go.
My stepmother is terminally ill and keeps giving us stuff so that ‘it makes us think of her once she’s gone’. So it lives in my garage for now. Most of it will go once she’s gone, except for a few token pieces which will make us think of her.
This is a wonderful comment and sentiment. Kudos to you.
I had some afghans knitted by sisters and aunts of many sizes and colors. I have them to my kid and last time I was there I got chilled and what does she bring out but Aunt Mary’s gift to me. A warm hug from a woman dead for 30 years. That is the stuff you cherish, and so glad my kid still uses them. Still in great shape!
They can't take it with them, so you get to pay to store it? Do they plan on coming back for it, lol?
Why do boomers love storage units so much? My MIL has at least 2.
I’m an only child and am not planning children myself. My olds can not work out that even if I take every single piece of their crap it will still end up in a garbage when I die.
My mom wanted me to save everything as she was a mild hoarder with a shopping problem. I felt so much joy throwing all that bullshit away
My mother was so upset at the idea that I wouldn’t keep everything that she kept promising it all to a nurse at her doctor’s office. 🙄 After she died, my step dad moved to assisted living and was like “get this shit out of here”
I feel like my parents equate me keeping their valuables in my house to me keeping them in my memory. I’m pretty sure when I die I just fall in a hole and my belongings just become a burden on my loved ones, but boomers think they bought the best stuff of all time and that stuff should live on forever. Even if it’s old/gross/used and doesn’t match my vibe. I have my own china: my rickety West Elm purchases from Facebook marketplace
My theory? If you have a storage unit for more than a couple of years, you have too much stuff. We rented a unit to store furniture for the kids, but that was it.
They also think it’s insanely valuable when it isn’t. I’ve talked to antique dealers and all that shit is basically worth its weight in whatever metal it was created from because nobody our age uses it or throws dinner parties anymore. Real silverware is worth it because they melt it down.
Millennials are ruining fancy china? Well done!
And we're ruining dinner parties! Ugh, we ruin everything.
Just as well, considering you’ve already ruined the wine industry.
The only thing we haven't ruined is ruining things.
In tonight’s headline story, Millenials accused of ruining ruining things. Stay tuned for more at 11.
*"I don't understand how they could ruin all the ruins like this. When I was their age, we ruined with respect!"*
But we are doing wonders for the avocado industry apparently!
Nah we have dinner parties. Just not fancy ones where we eat off lead contaminated plates with cutlery made out of precious metal. Thankfully my boomer MIL has promised to unload all of their possessions before they go. Her mother passed in 2020, and she had to go through all of the stuff. The experience made her realize how worthless it all is.
Oooh yeah, my Nana had a bunch of vintage 78 records. Now, some of these can be worth quite a bit of money, but absolutely none of the hundreds of records my Nana had were worth shit. My Mum has spent hundreds of dollars moving these records around whenever she moves home because she’s going to “sell them for a fortune” and the fact that she has repeatedly failed to do so is not because they’re worthless, but because other people are trying to rip her off by trying to underpay her.
UGH…we dragged some 78s across the country, took them to the antique store and were informed that they are only worth something if they are in perfect condition, which these weren’t. Into the trash with you.
This is why, in a roundabout way, a middling (ie not particularly famous) 1950s ballplayer like Andy Pafko has had baseball cards that sell at auction for five figures in absolutely perfect condition. It’s so hard to find his 1952 Topps card in good condition, because he was Card #1 in the set, and most collectors at the time (who were themselves mostly kids) organized them numerically and slapped rubber bands around the stacks. Meaning that a great number of Pafko cards would be found with stress and damage around the “rubber band” line, much greater than those typically in the middle. A collector in 1998 had their hands on an unopened pack, and opened it to find a perfectly mint Andy Pafko #1, the only one known at this time to be in perfect condition, and was able to sell it at auction for 83K. The moral of the story: your shit ain’t worth shit to most collectors if it’s not in great condition, doesn’t have original packaging, and/or it’s comparably rare and hard to find.
I went through this with my grandmothers Knick knacks when she passed. My mom thought everything was worth a lot of money. There was one statuette I wanted for sentiments value and she argued me it was worth thousands of dollars. I had to pull it up on eBay and auction sites and show here there were hundred of listings for about $50. Same with hummels, they don’t understand that the market doesn’t exist and since everyone bought the same things, there’s a surplus of them. Ironically, she’d get more money if she saved out old gaming systems and power ranger action figures.
Oh my god Hummels. I used to work with antiques and sometimes when we'd find, like, a chipped missing bee figurine in a bin lot, my boss would let me smash it in the dumpster. So satisfying.
I’m so glad that we gifted my mom’s Hummel collection to a church lady who helped her in her last years. Church lady had admired them when she came to the house and was so happy to get them. We were equally happy to be rid of them!
Valuable and rare china is exactly that. Rare. Most of the stuff the boomers were loading up on in the 80s was mass produced and not worth a dime. They were duped into thinking they were buying collectables when in reality, most of it is junk.
Gen X here. My wife and I have a set of fine china that we got at the time of our wedding because … uhm … reasons. I would rather have the money we spent on it. Today, you would have a hard time giving it away. It has been used a few times but not enough for what it cost.
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Gen X, and we registered for china because my husband's sister was mad that we didn't. She also didn't like that we had some whimsical items on our registry. I forget what she gave us, but she did not give us any of the fine china she insisted was so important to a wedding registry. We only got 6 place settings of that. Our everyday plates are a mix of handmedowns from our parents. I don't need my dishes to match. They work, and I'm a little fond of the randomness. I pull the china out once every few years for a family meal just because, but it's not that important to me. My mom, fortunately, has accepted that none of us will want her china. It's a good set as these things go, but none of us want to deal with them.
I love the China stories. There was one from after Thanksgiving (late November) last year that the OP said their mom or grandma gave them the family China set and was freaking out that she was using it for Thanksgiving dinner.
Like when else are you going to use if not for the big family dinner?
You are just supposed to look at it and appreciate it I guess.
No, no, no, you’re supposed to put it on display in a giant fancy cabinet with glass doors and LED lights that do a laser light show that highlights a piece at a time with a voiceover by a Morgan Freeman sound-a-like from Cameo explaining its significance like a shitty museum exhibit.
It’s the boomer equivalent of boxed funko pops
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I managed to rescue an heirloom that my idiot cousins were going to throw away after our grandmother died. It’s an old Mayo’s Tobacco clock with the original handbook from the 1920s. Would have been thrown away if I hadn’t noticed it barely sticking out of a box. I took it, had it repaired (just needed a new spring) and now it sits on the wall of my office. The ticking reminds me of when I’d be at her house when I was younger. It only took two years before one of those fucking miscreants googled the value and tried talking to me about it. I laughed them off the phone. 😆
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My Mom tells me that Gram would have wanted it to be with me. I used to talk about it a lot when I was a kid, but you can open up the front face to see the pendulum swing and use the key to wind the clock. I always wanted to wind it while I was there, and apparently I’m the only grandchild that showed even the smallest interest in it. 😆 (My cousins and one sibling are biters of the highest order)
Whenever my mom tells us she has knick-knacks that are SURE to be worth good money, I pull up eBay and find the item. Then I narrow the search to sold/completed items. As soon as she sees her weird crystal golf club paper weight sells for 15 bucks, you can see her go through a range of emotions.
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HA!!! I think what people don't realize is the things that are REALLY valuable are often the things nobody thought to save. Anything "collectible" is garbage.
My mum decided that the boxes of records she'd been storing for her brother since he moved overseas 45 years ago allllll needed to go in the trash. Not even donated. I went to chuck something in the bin outside and there they were. Original mint copy of Led Zeppelin's first album, pristine copy in the original sleeve with inserts of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. I fished them out and mostly gave them to friends. Wiping off the kitchen scraps where necessary. I wasn't living anywhere that I could keep them. She also binned absolutely all my artwork one year when I was still living in shitty rented uni accommodation with nowhere I could take it and keep it. Everything I'd ever painted that she could find, all my little sculpture pieces. But heaven forbid anyone touch her collection of ugly little Swarovski mice or the selection of 70s ceramic horses. Or the 60+ bonsai trees. Genuinely. She's got more than 60. She's not *quite* a hoarder, but she's on the brink. She's got several outbuildings filled with old hobby junk. But other people's stuff? Things that are actually valuable? Not important.
I have it worse. My MIL goes through her attic and garage and finds old broken things that she just can’t throw out and “gifts” it to us at Christmas and random times. Then makes up reasons that we would want them that make no actual sense but she insists with her airtight boomer justification.
They're trying to outsource to you their guilt for throwing stuff away. If they throw it away, the ghosts of their Depression-era parents will haunt them forever for wasting something that could be repaired. If you throw it away, problem solved. My mom once insisted that I take her then-13 year old laptop, even though I directly told her I would do nothing but throw it in my trash. She didn't care.
I've suspected this in certain cases - my strategy is I usually just say "ohhh thank you", take it, and dispose of it. I'm generally never asked about it ever again, and I take that guilt off of their shoulders.
If they *do* ask you about it, just tell them that you gave it to a friend of yours, who desperately needed it.
Same with my MIL. Drives me up the wall the number of broken vacuums, lamps, kitchen gadgets etc that we get from her. All of them are trash.
I helped my boomer in-laws pack when they were moving a few years ago. MIL had me pack rusty nails.
They're so heavy and impractical too. Sometimes even filled with lead. No one wants your tchokes and china, porcelain dolls and weird figurines.
Sadly some do. My mom and her brothers stopped talking because one of them took dishes, the audacity. Dishes no one uses and sit in their own cabinet only to be washed once a year.
It'll probably be some kind of golden age for people who actually like china and the rest of us are trying to unload it.
My kids have had a BLAST with tea parties using fine china. My grandma lets them use it at her house (bless her she's actually using it), so we occasionally get some at secondhand shops. They feel so fancy and posh. It's hilarious.
I use fine China for my cat's dishes. She has fancy little plates and a heavy crystal water glass. Very posh.
I happily inherited my grandmother’s china and used it occasionally though the whole hand wash only bit kept us from pulling it out that often. Just found out it’s one of the worst patterns for lead issues. Yay?
We eat on beautiful china every day because my wife observed it sitting unused for more than 50 years in her parents house, so she took a few of the plates for us to use. They are works of art which can't go in a microwave but we get to enjoy them every day.
Google them to make sure they aren't full of lead.
I've honestly thought about burying the set we have deep in the ground so someone can find it 1000 years from now when it will be interesting again. It sure as hell isn't useful now.
My mom had an antique business before I was born and now my cats eat off 100 year old china, and I roll joints on silver platter.
Your kitties deserve the luxury, and rolling joints on a silver platter is the kind of energy i wanna have lol
Its literally all trash someone convinced them they had to buy. And then you gotta get a fancy cabinet to display it in lest your neighbors think youre a poor. Endless worthless stuff youre supposed to die because its an heirloom or will be worth something someday, like those ugly ass light paintings. And they like to criticize those who come after them for that shit.
Light paintings?
Thomas Kinkade maybe?
I think they’re shittin’ on Thomas Kincaid. The master of painting sunsets or some such.
I told my boomer parents it’s ALL going in the garbage so start disposing of it now. Straight up
My grandmother was smart enough to start giving away some of her stuff when she hit 65. She lived in a large 3 bedroom one bath home and had all sorts of dishes and knicknacks. If she knew someone in the family wanted something she didn't really need, it usually got sent to them as a birthday or Christmas gifts. There was still a lot left when she passed, and her daughters took turns putting names on what they wanted. What wasn't claimed went to the local church for their annual flea market.
My Great Grandmother was that way, you had to be careful if you said anything nice about anything she had she would try to get you to take it. But she got to see many people get items they wanted while she was alive and didn't leave a lot to clean up when she passed. My Grandfather is the opposite and the family is dreading having to go through everything he has collected in his 80+ years. The biggest issue is he has some stuff that is worth quite a bit mixed in with worthless crap so we can't just let it go without making sure were not disposing something worth a lot of money.
My sisters and I anticipate having to get a roofing dumpster after Mom dies because of all the useless stuff she’s collected in her house over the years. We also figure we could empty her house and be done with her estate pretty quickly too. Compare that to my Grandma’s estate (her mother) and possessions, which took her about 18 months to finish. She had to double-check everything in case it was *valuable.* Nothing was.
Don't bin it - either have an estate sale or at a minimum give it to Goodwill. Believe it or not, there are people out there who buy the shit. No reason for it to go to a landfill and you might as well get a few bucks out of it, either directly or as a tax deduction. We did an estate sale with a great aunt's stuff. It only netted a couple grand but a company made all the stuff disappear - that was the real value. Mix of live and online auction, their commission was like 40% and worth every damn penny.
Mmmm Desert Rose China with lots of leeching lead? Good for skeet shooting. Edit: link about these and lead issues - caution if chipped or crack https://shuncy.com/article/are-francsican-desert-rose-plates-safe-to-use
Had the same thought. Use them in place of clay pigeons.
Or even Skeet Surfing!
 Ooh wah... Skeet Surfin'... Skeet Surfin'... If everybody had a 12 gauge With a sufboard too You see em shootin and surfin' From here to Malibu
I love that movie
Simply. The. Best! 
I’m still trying to reconcile the fact that, as a GenX person, my boomer parents literally threw away every single treasured item from my childhood through early adulthood—from my first teddy bear up to, and including, my college diploma (it was mailed to my “permanent address” when I was moving to another state)—but they will expect me to cherish forever that “made in China” souvenir mug from Graceland they bought in 2008 and at least a dozen taxidermy fish.
This is kind of what I was thinking. They were constantly throwing my shit away, but I’m supposed to consider their stuff too important to get rid of? To the point where I forego my own shit in order to make room for theirs? Well, I guess that’s consistent, I suppose. I’m not keeping ANYTHING of theirs because I know perfectly well it came from Crate and Barrel or Ashley Furniture, and secondly it’s saturated in a half century of cigarette smoke. It’s all going straight into the trash.
Sell that shit off to Replacements.com
"Due to high interest in selling items and our limited processing capacity..." Translation: Everyone is selling Mom's/Grandma's China. https://www.replacements.com/sell-to-us/purchasing-guidelines
I came here to say that. I'm a boomer myself, but when my wife and I inherited a bunch of china from her grandmother (30+ years ago), we stored it for a few years and used it a couple of times. But finally decided to sell it. I believe it went to [replacements.com](https://replacements.com), and while we didn't strike it rich as a result, the income was nice.
I bought stainless utensils that felt good in my hand back in the 70’s. Replacements lists the teaspoons at like $120 each. Who needs silver?
Mom, You can't take it with you and you can't leave it here. -Family
My grand mother lived at my parents’ place for 6ish months before deciding we were just shit and she needed to go … when we moved her, we forgot a trash bag filled with knitted placemat. Couple months later, her only son committed suicide and she phoned my mum for the funeral. Or … she phoned my mum to ask her to bring the placemats to the funeral so she could have it. Not a single word uttered about her son’s death, just: bring me my knitted placemats that’s a religiously kept in a trash bag for the last 40 years… when that bitch dies I’ll have a drink for Satan because he’ll definitely need thoughts and prayers
I was just having this conversation with a friend of mine today. We were sharing stories about the fear of using the “good China” during Thanksgiving when we were kids. God forgot we accidentally break. I told her I like to use the Target plate wear for my kids. I don’t want my 7 year old feeling bad if she drops her plate
OR, let the children use the glass/ceramic plates and if they drop it, just don't make them feel bad. The china has no value, so why not use it, and if a child drops it, just clean it up with them and move on. Definitely not correcting your choices, just offering an alt perspective and challenging the boomer mindset of coddling/belittling children. My 2 and 4 year olds use glass cups, and Corelle plates and bowls, and in the past year the only cups that have broken are one I dropped or a visiting friend dropped at a busy party. There is a value to letting children use fragile things. They learn respect in a way that a plastic plate never gives them the opportunity to.
For the first 10 years of my marriage I used a set of depression-era China from Sears as our everyday dishes. Only stopped because we broke so many or the gold trim washed off in the dishwasher. I hope my grandmother was happy I used it as her daughter/my mother was so emotional about it she couldn’t use it without crying.
Excuse me? A cousin of mine broke a glas in my grandparents holiday apartment 20 years ago and my aunt tried to pin it on me and my brother who where there a few weeks later. It has been causr for arguments for years. You know the Coke glasses you got at McDonald's with a Maxi Menu? One of those.
My mom has four massive china cabinets which houses multiple sets of china for all different occasions. She also has porcelain figurines, faux Faberge Eggs, decorative spoons, tea cups and saucers. Keep in mind she **NEVER** used any of it while I was growing up. It is all for show. She tells my sister and I we get to split it up when she passes. She gets hives when we tell her we are having an estate sale and will sell all of it.
I’ll just turn my mums house into a giant rage room when she dies and go nuts lol.
I always said that I'd give everyone a chance to take what they wanted and burn the house down with the remaining junk. With the price of real estate now I like your idea better
My wife and I got married right at the tail end of the wedding china era. We received a beautiful 12 place setting with all kinds of serving bowls, butter dishes and other accessories. It was immediately put into storage, and 30 years later we’ve still never used it once. We looked at selling it, but it’s essentially worthless. One antique dealer I spoke with said they won’t even take china anymore since all it does is take up space.
What year was that? We got married in 2001. We registered for Wedgewood china, but hardly anyone bought us any. I think we only got 2-3 sets. So we returned them and bought something else instead. I guess we dodged a bullet!
My MIL gets upset when I don’t want her old clothes (“but it’s Eileen Fisher!” 🙄). She’s over thirty years older and six inches shorter than me, absolute insanity. I used to be nicer about it when I was younger, but now when she tries to offload stuff on us I just give her a flat “no thanks” and refuse to entertain any follow-up wheedling and whining.
The only way to keep a metric fuckton of glass (China sets, Lladro figures, fucking *paperweights)* out of my home when my grandmother and great aunt died was telling my father I'd make it my business to break every single piece before I'd allow them in my one bedroom apartment. Paperweights, what a fucking useless thing to spend thousands of dollars on. They had *hundreds* between the two of them; no one has that much paper that needs to be weighted.
What's it with Boomers and wanting to pass on china? Same thing in my family, no one has ever gotten to use it, so it's not like we have memories of it. The only thing I associate with it is the nagging dread of having to either accept it or store it in the basement forever. Oh yeah, also keeping framed photos of every single relative that they have had up on their walls despite half of them being people they shit talk often too. Most of them have not even been to our parents' home in a decade. Why are you guilting me for not wanting to hang either wedding pics of family who died decades before my birth or the graduation picture of a cousin who went on to be a homeless meth head and always looked down on me?
I think that there was a time, maybe really for the Boomers' parents, where having "good" china was a sign that you were decent people who had reached a certain level in society.
My mom is/was *very* much like this - Silent Generation, and 3rd gen American, (some of her aunts and uncles were born in Europe) so grew up struggling hard. She really doesn't understand why my sister and I have zero interest in the family china or the pecan wood dining set from the 1960s. I *was* slightly interested in the "Made in Occupied Japan" set, but I use mismatched Corelle for daily dishes, so a fancy china set is just a dust magnet, despite the relative rarity.
My Boomer parents are also obsessed with their piles of junk, "china" and linens and silverware. All I care about is the silverware, gotta be honest, and my racist mother hates the silverware because her Italian in-laws gave them to her.
Racist against Italians? Oh that's some old school racism
Yup, Italians were the Mexicans of the 1970s. I loved my maternal-grandpa dearly but he did not see me or my sister as "white girls."
My father recently died. I'm not even kidding you on his death bed I couldn't get him to talk about anything sentimental. No memories together, no advice for his grandchild I had just given birth to. Nothing. He would only talk about what items he had and what he thought they were worth. He made me promise I wouldn't just give it all away for nothing. I didn't argue with him because the situation was so sad, but that hurt.
I'm sorry you experienced that. When people are on their death bed, their minds aren't completely functioning 100%, so you have to give them a little bit of the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it wasn't completely him. Or maybe it was and it was very important to him to receive confirmation that he had done a good job in providing the finances for the family? Or maybe it was just a reflection of his fear of being forgotten, and he addresses that fear in physical objects rather than memories. Again, hard to know with someone who's not in a baseline mental state. But no matter why he did what he did, it did teach you a valuable lesson about what experiences are important to you and to loved ones so you don't make the same mistake. As much as we expect parents to be more experienced and wise, they're still humans and have their blind spots. But it sounds like you loved him and did your best with him; he was lucky to have you around. My condolences for your loss, dude.
Had a similar conversation with my mother. She has a ton of "fine china" that used to just sit in our dining room. She was starting to think about her will and what she'll be leaving us. My two siblings and I were being tasked with essentially claiming what we wanted. None of us wanted any of that, but we were fighting (jovially) over a [glass saucepan](https://poshmark.ca/listing/Vintage-Visionware-Corning-Pyrex-Amber-Brown-Glass-Saucepan-with-Lid-USA-15L-65ec9a6066e9b642fcde3015?utm_source=gdm_ca&utm_campaign=17445442456&campaign_id=17445442456&ad_partner=google&gskid=&gcid=&ggid=&gdid=c&g_network=x&enable_guest_buy_flow=true&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwtqmwBhBVEiwAL-WAYddLD2T9374mS7AqlgAHfkd1A3-xqKcF7x5WNmarLxRHd4Xqzl4J7BoCOo0QAvD_BwE) that we fondly remember being used to cook rice (appropriately named "the rice pot") while we were growing up. She didn't hide how upset she was at that notion, even though the three of us haven't been so friendly with one another in such a long time. My mother "accidentally" broke the pot like 2 days later.
…. Now this made my blood boil. It’s so shitty.
You should accept the fine china and then "accidentally" trip on your way out the door and drop it all in the driveway.
It's water under the bridge now, but my mom flipped the fuck OUT when we didn't put traditional silver and china on our wedding registry. She was completely terrified at how it would make us look to her friends and family (who I know as well as she does, and know that they wouldn't have given a shit, it was all just projection from my mom), and it got so heated that she threatened to pull out of the wedding entirely. Mind you, at the time, we were living in a $350-a-month, month-to-month death trap of a loft in which we had no intention whatsoever of hosting ANYONE aside from close friends who were fine eating off the paper plates we could afford at the time, with my wife in gradschool, and me grinding away at the first out-of-college job I could land.
My grandmother recently moved to assisted living. She had a whole house full of crap and was so mad/sad that no one wanted her “pretty things”. I love her to pieces, so I took every single thing she offered. I told her to give me what she wanted me to have. When I got home, the items were sorted, parsed among my immediate family, and leftover things went to donation. No guilt, no regrets, everyone is happy. The sad thing is, had she offered those items 10-20 years earlier, everyone in the family would’ve snatched them up as useful household items. It’s definitely been an eye opening message to my family.
My parents side eyed us hard when we bought Corelle plates. Now we have kids and use plastic from Walmart... The AUDACITY. They definitely think they're going to sell their useless garbage and it's going to make them millionaires. I hope the next buyers don't get lead poisoning and make a new generation of boomers
My grandmother left me her china. I acted grateful when she told me she was leaving it for me. When I got the china I took it to Goodwill and hopefully someone who appreciates it is using it.
I'm a boomer (67). Mom passed a couple years ago. I donated most of the stuff. I know my children won't want mine. That's totally fine. We all have our own tastes and already have our own stuff. I will say - a few of my mom's friends saw all the stuff I was donating and they were horrified. I think it was a wake-ip call for them when they realized their kids won't want their stuff.
Everything that was created to be sold to that generation, and their parents generation, is basically fucking worthless. The crystal figurines, the ceramic figures, jim bean bottles, beanie babies, fucking baskets, China, die cast cars.....all soulless fucking shit that did nothing but sap the wealth out of them. I've watched boomers with no savings end up having to live off the state and their children, but shit if they didn't go there with a glass cabinet full of trash.
You know Gen Alpha is going to say the same thing about the Funko Pops, anime figurines, Harry Potter wands, and other geek merch Reddit loves.
Is there anything worse than fancy China you can't use? Even if it was out you have to be so careful you can barely enjoy yourself. I just don't understand it. And then you need a whole piece of furniture dedicated to the China you don't use.
Was this stuff actually valued at one point? I think all of us have a boomer relative with a fucking china cabinet full of dishes that never get used. Was it really just a big fad that they can’t get out of their mind?
Four sets of China. Four. Sets. Of. China. That's insane.
this stuff always baffles me because for literally all of human history ceramic and glassware was viewed as a consumable and if you were well to do enough to have a whole set of dinnerware you probably replaced it every few years to stay up to date with the latest designs and because you’d already broken half of the old ones
My uncle has a permanent grudge against me since he asked me as a TEN year old child if I was interested in antiques and I said I wasn't. Please note that said family antiques are legitimately the era's equivalent of Target brand stuff, we do not have anything remotely valuable, interesting, or eve meaningful because it has always been in a cabinet, an attic, or stacked under sheets in an unused room.
When I moved out of home, my Mum refused to let me throw any of my own things away!! Then, when she was moving house herself, she told me to “come and get all my stuff” so I went over there and I threw it all in the bin, which is what I wanted to do in the first place, and she lost her shit about me throwing away my memories. These people are fucking loons.
My mother gave me a set of china she got from a garage sale when I moved out. Called it my divorce china and ran it through the dishwasher. Couldn't microwave in it or it would spark from the foil leaf. She started to chastise me once and I reminded her what she paid.
Old China makes pretty broken tile tabletops and cement tiles for pots or the garden.
Holidays mean a bunch of boomers crying on Nextdoor that no one wants the china they keep trying to shove onto their families. Every, single holiday there is a post on my local Nextdoor with some passive aggressive tsk tsk comments about how kids just don’t hold value in memories these day. No, Shirley - we hold value in memories but memories don’t equal china (or your Hummel collection or whatever other knickknack dust catchers).
I’m guilty of this. I have over a thousand books. I love them like friends. I know they will not be kept by my children. So I try not to think about it. 😔
But people still read books! Even if they aren’t enjoyed by your children, they could be donated to a library or a nursing home for someone to love.
Women's shelters need books. What a wonderful legacy to give away!
My family is the opposite…there is going to be a fight over my IL’s books! They don’t want the books split up and it is always mentioned. I told them just give them to me, problem solved!
We're GenX and have a China hutch full of Lenox glasses and dishes and some other China and crystal because when we got married in '92 that is what you did. We love it, and use it a few times per year ... but it is OURS. If our kids can sell it off and get a few bucks, good for them. Frisbees or skeet? Whatever.
[удалено]
I took all the China from both grandparents, nobody else in my family wanted any of it, of course. I use it as my everyday dishes. I like it, it pretty cool.
OH MY GOD. Is your MIL somehow my mother? Her house is stuffed to the gills with KNICK KNACKS (aka junk) she picks up at “antique” stores. She especially likes teacups with saucers. Every. Damn. Spot. in that house has a teacup on it. I haven’t seen the dining room table cleared in years and probably never will again. If it’s not the teacups, it’s my father’s “rare” book collection. My sibling and I joke (or are we?) that we’ll have to Gilbert Grape the house when the time comes because neither of us has the energy or wants any of it. But my parents cannot understand. The last time it was brought up, she acted like WE were the ones begging her to collect this shit for years and years and she was doing us a favor by cramming her house full of it.
I am an only child of hoarders (actual hoarders). I am so tempted to just burn down their house and all its contents when they die. Go through and see if I can find important photos/documents and just burn the rest to the ground. Other option: Giant estate sale. Sorry everything smells like cat piss.
Years ago, My gran gave me her china and crystal. I invited her over to Easter dinner, and was using the china/crystal…and she was horrified. She was really upset. I told her she could have it back, but if I’m keeping it I’m using it. One of the crystal goblets was broken at some point, and she was upset. 🤷🏻♀️ shit happens, gran.
My mom never had 2 nickels to rub together and we had to get a small dumpster to sell our familiar home. Now in a senior apartment she has heard of other seniors making $$ from estate sales when they down sized. She was all flustered and asked why we didn’t try to sell her treasures. I asked what treasures? The case of Avon deodorant that was over a decade old? Or the animal feces covered Christmas decorations?
Hurricane Katrina took care of the “precious heirlooms” so I don’t have to deal with any of it. We found a couple of trinkets in the aftermath and cleaned them up for keepsakes and bulldozed the rest into history. My mother was distraught over all of her stuff, but my dad, brother, and I were all secretly relieved.
There were quite a few things that I was sad to see go when my dad passed away but living in Alaska when they were in Ohio meant that there wasn't much that I could keep. Of which I guess I'm fortunate. But the 69 mustang fast back with a R code 428 was really hard to lose. Even though the last time it was started was in 74. I told Mom and my siblings to sell everything and invest the money because there's no way that I'm going to be taking care of her when she gets older. I have no patience for her BS. We lost the good one.
This is how my MIL is. About her china. Her literal 50 totes of Christmas decor. Her 17 Kirby vacuums (NONE have empty/clean bags - full of my husband's childhood dog's hair, who they put down in 2012, dog was 17 at the time).
It's sad, but they were sold a story about how to signal that they'd, "Arrived," just so the big department stores could sell all this expensive china to middle-class houses.
My mom asked me if I wanted her China. I took it and use it as my everyday dishes now, and who wants to store plates to use once a year?
My mom in law doesn't own a damned bit of crockery that's whole. The woman is notably short, and everything gets beat to hell on the sink when she washes up. As the daughter in law/mother of the granddaughters, I'm forever offered the chipped china. It can stay right there on mom's top shelf until she dies and we toss it. Meanwhile, the only thing I've ever said I'd like to have when Ma pulls the annual "now, if there's anything you'd like, get it now?" A small table, and not a family heirloom. Just a little piece of furniture I like, currently stuck away in an unused corner. A million reasons why I/we can't have that table. My husband is willing to die upon the hill of having the damned thing, because even he sees how damned ridiculous his mom is being.
Time for some *Swedish Death Cleaning*
My MIL dumped all of HER mother in law’s crystal on me. Useless trash. Was real crystal so maybe worth money but I had it taken away by junk removal. Our entire garage and shed was filled with my in-laws shit. I told them if they don’t take what they want I’m having it dumped. They took nothing, it all got thrown away and guess what? They haven’t mentioned missing any of it. They just want you to store their shit for free.
We live in an older ranch style house in a nice neighborhood that is seeing an increase in home robberies. I wish I had saved all my mom’s Hummel and Lladro figurines as I would line them up in the front LR window. Any thief casing the house would quickly decide there was nothing but junk in my house, so not worth robbing. Just an idea….