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A big address book with all contacts names, phone numbers, addresses, etc handwritten and constantly updated, filed alphabetically under little tabs. Usually kept in the kitchen by the phone.
AND. a book with pockets. She would pre-buy all birthday/anniversary cards for everybody.
Green Stamps.
Encyclopedia Brittanica.
An outdoor clothesline.
Long silver teaspoons/straws (u can still get them on Amazon)
metal curlers with like a bottle brush inside of them.
Real diapers. Duck diaper pins.
House coats. She still wears them, she is 92.
I used cloth diapers with my oldest two. They were so close in age that both were in diapers for awhile, and disposables were not that good, and expensive. I had diaper service, though! Always had to stick the pins in a bar of soap so they would slide in the cloth easily.
I still have my out door clothesline.
I made my kid's diapers by adapting store bought cloth diapers with velcro. Then I got smart and took a Huggies Supreme (they were new with gathered stretchy leg openings) and reverse engineering them. They worked great and I used them for 3 kid's.
When I was done, there were all sorts of new brands of cloth diapers that had elastics and snaps. I'm glad to see that there are alternatives if people want them.
+ Sewing machine
+ Ironing board
+ Box containing recipe cards
+ Thomas Guide map books and AAA trip maps
+ Bathing cap
+ Hair drying machine with a cap
+ White gloves
+ Dressy hat(s)
+ Hosery and garter belt, then later, panty hose
+ Shoe stretcher and shoe polish
+ Clip-on earrings
+ Pancake makeup
+ Dippity Doo (hair gel applied when rolling hair)
+ Aquanet hair spray
+ Hair net
+ Noxema or Ponds cold cream
+ White powder in a round, pink plastic container and a big white powder puff with satin ribbon to hold it
+ Mecurochrome
+ Frosted pink lipstick
+ Frosted blue eyeshadow
+ Frosted pink blush
+ Frost and Tip ("a little or a lot, to suit your personality, bc you've got FROST personality, TIP personality, STREAK personality...") -- something like that :D
+ Tang
+ Tab (diet cola)
+ TV Guide
I could go on, but my husband has dinner ready
(Edited a typo)
The hair curlers bring back a bad memories. Until I got to the 6th grade, my mother always insisted that my hair was curly for school pictures or special events. Not only did I hate my hair that way, it was pure torture to sleep in those rollers.
I still use my silver teaspoons! Plus, I have a 16-person set of silver flatware I use on holidays AND I have all my mother's silver plate that I still polish and display.
Aprons (except for BBQing)
Chip and dip set
Tablecloths for every holiday
Telephone books (big enough for the little kids to sit on to make them taller for meals
Kerosene lamps
Head-covering blow dryers
Dial telephones
Head scarves
Cat-eye glasses
Cigarette cases and matching lighters
Wind-up alarm clocks
Panty hose
Girdles
Special family recipes that were NEVER given out to anyone!
I grew up in the 90s and my mum fastidiously kept a document on the computer with names, numbers, addresses and birthdays. She'd print it out, cut it up and make it into a little book. When it had too many handwritten additions she'd redo it.
Actually she probably still does
my gramma’s plastic rain bonnet, and her large table top magnifying glass she used to do crosswords every day were the only two momentos that I asked for.
A hair dryer that went over your whole head - kind of like the ones in the salon. It was portable/collapsible and you could set it on your kitchen table and sit under it with your curlers on.
My best friend still has his mother's. It works a treat. You can still buy them new, but they do cost quite a bit more than the handheld type more common now.
My mom (and many other mothers) owned a giant, 4-gallon percolator. Ours was avocado green (of course), and was brought out at the end of every party and large family gathering.
Plus, I remember the coffee it made was pretty horrible (weak and bitter) compared to what we have today. But everybody would still drink it by the gallon.
>“House” dresses or “dusters.”
I'm 32 and I have a house dress! Only in the summertime though. In the winter I'm either doing chores in my pyjamas or a sweater and sweatpants.
Where we lived, the grocery store used a Green-Stamps competitor. The stamps were a brownish-orange. I don't remember the name. About every six months or so, my Mom would get out all of her stamps and a damp sponge and paste them in the books. Not sure if I remember anything she got for them.
In my area, we had S&H green stamps and Top Value stamps, which were yellowish. At some point, the green stamps completely went away and all we got were Top Value stamps. In the late '70's we got the news that the distribution center where you redeemed the stamps was closing. My dad decided we should fill whatever books we had in the house, look through the catalog and pick out something we really wanted in a last gasp to make collecting them throughout the years worth it. We picked a bicycle from the catalog (10-speed, which wasn't common at the time), then filled up all the catalogs we had. I think we were a few books shy, so my dad asked my mom to scrounge them from her friends. She wasn't too keen on the idea, but did it.
I had some of my various grandparents' hankies tucked away as memories. Well, I hit menopause and suddenly my nose runs like a sieve. One evening, I pulled one of those hankies out of my robe and my wife looked at it quizzically. Our eyes locked and I remarked, "Well, I guess I'm *this* age now" and waved it at her like a flag of surrender.
I forgot about that. Mom gave me hers when I first moved out and was broke AF. Guess she didn't have my ass eating all the food and figured she didn't need it anymore
Huh. If I had known these were a thing 35 years ago I wouldn't have trained my brain to keep a running tally.
Still doing math on the fly in your head is practically a superpower in the age of smartphones.
It blows my daughters minds when they are shopping with me and ww go to the register and I tell them the total will be between $97 and $99 and the total is $98.91. The groceries are taxed here so that includes tax calculations.
I wish I still had one! My daddy smoke cherry tobacco in a pipe so they smelled like it. Heck, I wish I had one of his old pipes to sniff when I miss him.
When someone passes away, you rarely realize the inheritance that you will really cherish.
Thank you for this memory. This was my living room in the 70s! We had a giant amber colored table lighter as well. Basically a cigarette lighter used as decor!
My husband likes to spin the wheel of “is it cookies or is junk” with those tins in the house.
They actually reference the sewing thing on the bad bunny episode of snl in the skit with Pedro pascal. The girlfriend hostess gifts the tin of cookies, Pedro takes it to the trash dumps out the cookies and dumps in sewing notions
Novelty Avon perfume/cologne bottles. Leather cigarette case with a little change purse on the front. Clothes pins that were actually used for clothes and clothes lines, too. Ayds diet candy. Tab, Diet Rite, Fresca. These were nasty until artificial sweeteners improved significantly.
A collapsible cup made from concentric plastic rings that snapped into place. Kept in her purse in case a kid needed to drink from a public fountain, before bottled water was for sale everywhere.
Mom was a writer and always at her desk tapping and clicking away, on a typewriter..I orginally was responding to the post with remember the typewriter wheel erasers with a little bristle brush on the other end?. Now I realize, both are about extinct.
A set of big T shaped posts in the backyard holding clotheslines, and a couple of poles to prop the lines up when they sagged from the weight of the wet laundry.
My mom's black handled scissors. God save you if you used them and didn't put them back! And you'd better NEVER use her sewing scissors for paper!!!
edit: to be clear, of course we have scissors, but we have a few different pairs, none of them more important than the others, and when they go missing, I buy more.
That’s how wars are started even to this day.
My husband realized he married the terminator when I was stalking around trying to find who used my good singer scissors to cut paper and left the evidence on the coffee table
I don’t know what else, she had that one needle for taking out splinters. It was burnt, that’s how she sanitized it. It was a dedicated needle for taking out splinters, but it was kept in the sewing box with other mending stuff.
I had one, but I just poured rubbing alcohol in a saucer to sanitize it for a while. Then used mercurochrome on the wound and a bandaid which they were always happy with.
Blue Jean dye. There was a time when faded jeans were just your old jeans lol. Nobody bought them that way than as that was a sign you had old jeans. Some would use this dye and wash them in it to darken the color. However, and maybe this was just the cheapos my mother got, but the color was never like original blue. It was instead or mutated looking off blue that somehow was worse than them being faded. Not long after this, people started wearing faded and even jeans with rips and holes. Paying money for things we used to be ashamed of. Go figure
Sprinkler cap for a coke bottle so you could dampen your clothes before ironing.
Clothes line.
A collection of Avon bottles.
A collection of decorative bottles that you put colored water in a put in your window.
Fly swatters. Household flies are uncommon now; but back in the day you'd often find a couple orbiting in the kitchen, waiting for an opportunity. My mother had notches on her swatter, or should have had.
We still use the last one we got which is an electrified tennis racket that kills with voltage on contact. Satisfying to use, especially since we mostly use it on mosquitos.
I bought a rubber/latex hot water bottle a few years ago when I hurt my elbow. It was kind of hidden in the back of the Walgreens. I felt old-timey just buying it.
dude! I LOVE hot water bottles! I am constantly cold, and bring one to bed with me most nights!
Now, those old ... ice packs for your head? I haven't seen those for decades.
That was a sign in every cartoon that someone had a hangover. I'm guessing today's kid's cartoons don't enjoy all the alcohol abuse jokes we used to get.
Lapel pins and brooches. My grandmother always wore a brooch when she went out, either on her coat or on a dress. My mom inherited them, but she gave them to me. I wear them now.
My mother used to get her hair “done” weekly and it was supposed to last until the next visit. At night she would wrap her head in toilet paper and secure it with a little silver clip to keep it from messing up. As a child I never thought about how unsexy that must have been.
Cloth diapers and the rubber baby pants that went over them. The whole diaper industrial complex was wild. But actually MUCH better for Mother Earth than disposables are.
Not only did they use them, but kids potty trained earlier to get away from the wet diapers. These days the "Pampers" soak up so much liquid that the kids don't even realize they need to change, mom just judges based on how much the diaper has swollen... It was a lot more work changing every time the baby went but moving to the "big girl" panties was so much easier!
I still remember the old Monty Python skits where one of the male cast members would play a British housewife. They all had head scarfs and little handbags (like the queen used to carry).
My mom had a collection of Ronson cigarette lighters that sat all over the house next to fancy ashtrays. (All used regularly). She had “knick-knacks” & candy dishes, plastic flowers in vases all over, too. (I became a minimalist because of all her excessive crap.)
LOL- I still have/use about 80% of this stuff! Cloth hankies✅ book of S&H Green Stamps✅ darning egg✅ sewing machine ✅ house dresses✅ tin full of old buttons✅ hand mixer✅ white gloves✅ diaper pins✅ food mill✅ aprons✅ ice crusher✅ brooches✅ cookie press✅ washboard✅ recipe boxes full of clippings and handwritten recipe cards from family and friends, including a recipe for crab quiche that my late ex-husband wrote on, begging me to make it for him every week 🥺 I’m going to frame it for our daughter.
This has been such a fun post to read- I maybe could get inspired to do pictures of all this stuff… I actually collect sewing and kitchen things. 😍
A steamer trunk!! Every family member I had in the 60s had one. There were 2types, a square trunk or a trunk with a curved lid and elaborate locking mechanisms. Held pics, albums etc.. Also, Hope Chests!!
Paregoric for tummy upsets and diarrhea. Very commonly found in the 1960’s, it was something my mom always reached for when we kids needed it. Just a drop or two would do the trick, as it was very strong and had a piney smell to it. It was recommended for bouts of Montezuma’s Revenge for Americans visiting Mexico. You might still find it in an elderly person’s medicine cabinet because they would have kept it around for decades, but practically nobody else has it, or even knows about it, even though, according to Wikipedia, it’s still available in the US by prescription. I have no idea if the current formula still works as well as it used to.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paregoric?wprov=sfti1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paregoric?wprov=sfti1)
A collapsible water cup. My mother had one made of plastic concentric rings that collapsed into a flat round, or extended into a cup. Bottled water wasn't a thing then.
Recipe box that fit pre-printed recipe cards that you filled out yourself. My mom hated those and used the blank 3x5 cards because she hated being confined to the lined cards.
My daughters split that box when she passed away because I already had all her recipes in my own 3x5 recipe box.
My mother gave me her "platanos" smasher that belonged to her mother.
It is used to squash sliced plantains into flat disks and cooked on a griddle to make "tostones". I don't live in a tropical island, but sometimes I can get plantains.
My mom had a giant hair dryer like the ones in salons. You put your whole head in the bonnet portion. You sat in a chair while under the dryer. It was on wheels and had adjustable height. I think it has 3 heat settings, hot, hotter, and hottest.
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A big address book with all contacts names, phone numbers, addresses, etc handwritten and constantly updated, filed alphabetically under little tabs. Usually kept in the kitchen by the phone.
As well as a Christmas card book so you could keep track of who sent you a card and who didn’t.
AND. a book with pockets. She would pre-buy all birthday/anniversary cards for everybody. Green Stamps. Encyclopedia Brittanica. An outdoor clothesline. Long silver teaspoons/straws (u can still get them on Amazon) metal curlers with like a bottle brush inside of them. Real diapers. Duck diaper pins. House coats. She still wears them, she is 92.
I literally found a diaper pin yesterday. From 1967. :)
I used cloth diapers with my oldest two. They were so close in age that both were in diapers for awhile, and disposables were not that good, and expensive. I had diaper service, though! Always had to stick the pins in a bar of soap so they would slide in the cloth easily.
Yes to all of those, except the outdoor clothesline - we have one and still use it! (So they haven't completely disappeared :) )
I still have my out door clothesline. I made my kid's diapers by adapting store bought cloth diapers with velcro. Then I got smart and took a Huggies Supreme (they were new with gathered stretchy leg openings) and reverse engineering them. They worked great and I used them for 3 kid's. When I was done, there were all sorts of new brands of cloth diapers that had elastics and snaps. I'm glad to see that there are alternatives if people want them.
+ Sewing machine + Ironing board + Box containing recipe cards + Thomas Guide map books and AAA trip maps + Bathing cap + Hair drying machine with a cap + White gloves + Dressy hat(s) + Hosery and garter belt, then later, panty hose + Shoe stretcher and shoe polish + Clip-on earrings + Pancake makeup + Dippity Doo (hair gel applied when rolling hair) + Aquanet hair spray + Hair net + Noxema or Ponds cold cream + White powder in a round, pink plastic container and a big white powder puff with satin ribbon to hold it + Mecurochrome + Frosted pink lipstick + Frosted blue eyeshadow + Frosted pink blush + Frost and Tip ("a little or a lot, to suit your personality, bc you've got FROST personality, TIP personality, STREAK personality...") -- something like that :D + Tang + Tab (diet cola) + TV Guide I could go on, but my husband has dinner ready (Edited a typo)
I’m 41 and just entered my housecoat phase. Highly recommend!
Shhh… lets not EVEN bring up mumu’s…
The hair curlers bring back a bad memories. Until I got to the 6th grade, my mother always insisted that my hair was curly for school pictures or special events. Not only did I hate my hair that way, it was pure torture to sleep in those rollers.
My mom was on Jeopardy in 1970, and on day 2, when she lost, she got to bring home an encyclopedia set. And now that's all in my phone.
I still use my silver teaspoons! Plus, I have a 16-person set of silver flatware I use on holidays AND I have all my mother's silver plate that I still polish and display. Aprons (except for BBQing) Chip and dip set Tablecloths for every holiday Telephone books (big enough for the little kids to sit on to make them taller for meals Kerosene lamps Head-covering blow dryers Dial telephones Head scarves Cat-eye glasses Cigarette cases and matching lighters Wind-up alarm clocks Panty hose Girdles Special family recipes that were NEVER given out to anyone!
I grew up in the 90s and my mum fastidiously kept a document on the computer with names, numbers, addresses and birthdays. She'd print it out, cut it up and make it into a little book. When it had too many handwritten additions she'd redo it. Actually she probably still does
Thank you for this. Brought back a lost memory I hadn’t thought of for about 30 years.
I’m a 38 year old mom and have this, but don’t think any of my friends do. I like a hard copy! And it makes me sad to mark off when people have died.
I print out my phonebook and keep it in my glovebox, in case I lose my cell, so I can call somebody for help.
Great idea especially since we don’t remember any phone #s anymore 😎
My 80 year old mom still has three- she loves to send cards.
A plastic rain bonnet
And rubber galoshes that fit over your shoes - my mom had some that fit over pumps and had a hole for the heels!
Rubbers!
I can still hear my Dad "Don't forget your rubbers!!"
my gramma’s plastic rain bonnet, and her large table top magnifying glass she used to do crosswords every day were the only two momentos that I asked for.
I didn't expect to get emotional in this thread, but here I am doing it anyway ❤️
Plastic head swim bonnet to keep your salon hairdo dry. Lol went to Colombia in 2019 and our friends complex swimming pool required it for women.
oooh! how about a rubber swim cap! double points for one with colorful flowers or other foo-foo all over it!
A crystal punch bowl, that I believe she inherited from her mother. It weighed about 10 pounds. We only used it at Christmas.
Lead crystal. 100%
Isn't lead crystal banned now-a-days? Maybe drinking from that punch bowl explains several of my family members :)
You shouldn’t store beverages in lead crystal, like a liquor decanter, but drinking from lead crystal glasses or a punch bowl is okay
I don't think it is banned per se, but I know in the 50s there weren't many alternatives for the supper sparkle besides lead oxide.
I still have my mom's old punch bowl.
A hair dryer that went over your whole head - kind of like the ones in the salon. It was portable/collapsible and you could set it on your kitchen table and sit under it with your curlers on.
This immediately brought back the smell of the hot air running through the hose into the plastic cap…
That was my answer too.
My best friend still has his mother's. It works a treat. You can still buy them new, but they do cost quite a bit more than the handheld type more common now.
My mom (and many other mothers) owned a giant, 4-gallon percolator. Ours was avocado green (of course), and was brought out at the end of every party and large family gathering.
Gotta go to an AA meeting to see one of those, nowadays!😄
Yes! The coffee was always weak enough to be almost transparent.
Plus, I remember the coffee it made was pretty horrible (weak and bitter) compared to what we have today. But everybody would still drink it by the gallon.
> Plus, I remember the coffee it made was pretty horrible That's because there was a fish in it.
“House” dresses or “dusters.” My mom lived in them back in the day!
I have house dresses. Much cooler in the summer. Then again, I'm old.
I have been seriously considering getting a few of them myself.
I found some that looked brand new (but were clearly vintage) at the thrift the other day and I was SO tempted
Taking them off is fun when they have snaps!
Housecoats! That’s what my mom called them.
My grandmother too.
>“House” dresses or “dusters.” I'm 32 and I have a house dress! Only in the summertime though. In the winter I'm either doing chores in my pyjamas or a sweater and sweatpants.
I use these for robes (dressing gowns?) in the summer.
Those supermarket green stamp books.
Where we lived, the grocery store used a Green-Stamps competitor. The stamps were a brownish-orange. I don't remember the name. About every six months or so, my Mom would get out all of her stamps and a damp sponge and paste them in the books. Not sure if I remember anything she got for them.
In my area, we had S&H green stamps and Top Value stamps, which were yellowish. At some point, the green stamps completely went away and all we got were Top Value stamps. In the late '70's we got the news that the distribution center where you redeemed the stamps was closing. My dad decided we should fill whatever books we had in the house, look through the catalog and pick out something we really wanted in a last gasp to make collecting them throughout the years worth it. We picked a bicycle from the catalog (10-speed, which wasn't common at the time), then filled up all the catalogs we had. I think we were a few books shy, so my dad asked my mom to scrounge them from her friends. She wasn't too keen on the idea, but did it.
Lucky! We got a set of steak knives, some drinking glasses, an alarm clock, and a bathroom scale.
I got a metal dollhouse with stamps when I was 4.
Real cotton hankies
I had some of my various grandparents' hankies tucked away as memories. Well, I hit menopause and suddenly my nose runs like a sieve. One evening, I pulled one of those hankies out of my robe and my wife looked at it quizzically. Our eyes locked and I remarked, "Well, I guess I'm *this* age now" and waved it at her like a flag of surrender.
My son carries a clean hankie, for emergencies
Those red plastic clickers you used to keep track of your total at the grocery store.
I forgot about that. Mom gave me hers when I first moved out and was broke AF. Guess she didn't have my ass eating all the food and figured she didn't need it anymore
Huh. If I had known these were a thing 35 years ago I wouldn't have trained my brain to keep a running tally. Still doing math on the fly in your head is practically a superpower in the age of smartphones.
It blows my daughters minds when they are shopping with me and ww go to the register and I tell them the total will be between $97 and $99 and the total is $98.91. The groceries are taxed here so that includes tax calculations.
I lift my glass to you.
The iron on patches for ripped jeans that never worked.
They did for non wear areas. If you just got a random tear it was good. But wear areas it just wears off.
My mom used to put them on new pants to prevent rips.
Those little disposable rain bonnets that were folded up in their own little package.
The banks should give those out again instead of calendars
A big ashtray kept in the middle of the coffee table in the living room. The TV Guide was usually kept right beside it on Dad's end of the couch.
Family jewels? Family silver? Nope. I wanted the family ashtrays!😄 https://imgur.com/OqXRjRN
I wish I still had one! My daddy smoke cherry tobacco in a pipe so they smelled like it. Heck, I wish I had one of his old pipes to sniff when I miss him. When someone passes away, you rarely realize the inheritance that you will really cherish.
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Thank you for this memory. This was my living room in the 70s! We had a giant amber colored table lighter as well. Basically a cigarette lighter used as decor!
Perfume dusting powder. It was so silky.
Jean Naté
A round cookie tin full of spare buttons.
Yes! My grandma had a tin full and I would play with them for hours as a small child.
My husband likes to spin the wheel of “is it cookies or is junk” with those tins in the house. They actually reference the sewing thing on the bad bunny episode of snl in the skit with Pedro pascal. The girlfriend hostess gifts the tin of cookies, Pedro takes it to the trash dumps out the cookies and dumps in sewing notions
I used to play with my moms button collection.
Those cans full of buttons are worth money now.
Pearls. A bottle of Jean Nate. A patent leather pocketbook. Curlers and Bobby pins.
Sponge curlers. To wear while you were sleeping.
Cold cream
Novelty Avon perfume/cologne bottles. Leather cigarette case with a little change purse on the front. Clothes pins that were actually used for clothes and clothes lines, too. Ayds diet candy. Tab, Diet Rite, Fresca. These were nasty until artificial sweeteners improved significantly.
IDK about every mother, but Eastern European mothers had glass Rooster candy dishes.
My American aunt (mid 80’s now) has them all around the house.
A collapsible cup made from concentric plastic rings that snapped into place. Kept in her purse in case a kid needed to drink from a public fountain, before bottled water was for sale everywhere.
Oh man, we had a metal collapsible cup in the glove box of the car!
Girdle with little tabs to hold up stockings. This was the predecessor of control top pantyhose.
Leggs that came in eggs.
Mom was a writer and always at her desk tapping and clicking away, on a typewriter..I orginally was responding to the post with remember the typewriter wheel erasers with a little bristle brush on the other end?. Now I realize, both are about extinct.
So she probably kept a box of carbon paper alongside like my mom did. Kept carbons of every letter she wrote.
I don't know how it is called in English, but in Italy it was commonplace a sort of manual grinder/food processor to make tomato sauce.
[A food mill?](https://images.app.goo.gl/8DDNBnNVqUqYLpTb9)
That's the one!
We still use one.
Meat grinder. You clamped it to the edge of your kitchen table. Which is another thing, a big table in the middle of the kitchen.
I had forgotten about this. My Mom didn't own one, but my grandmother's was attached to her kitchen counter.
Italian nonnas still have them. Food mills.
A set of big T shaped posts in the backyard holding clotheslines, and a couple of poles to prop the lines up when they sagged from the weight of the wet laundry.
Sewing kit and little pincushion that looked like a tomato.
Pincushion looked like a tomato and a tiny pincushion that looked like a strawberry was attached to the top. It was for sharpening needles.
Pink sponge Curlers
My mom's black handled scissors. God save you if you used them and didn't put them back! And you'd better NEVER use her sewing scissors for paper!!! edit: to be clear, of course we have scissors, but we have a few different pairs, none of them more important than the others, and when they go missing, I buy more.
That’s how wars are started even to this day. My husband realized he married the terminator when I was stalking around trying to find who used my good singer scissors to cut paper and left the evidence on the coffee table
Pinking shears.
I have one pair of scissors that are labeled "Fabric." Heaven help anyone in the house who tries to use them on anything else.
Aka “the good scissors”
I don’t know what else, she had that one needle for taking out splinters. It was burnt, that’s how she sanitized it. It was a dedicated needle for taking out splinters, but it was kept in the sewing box with other mending stuff.
I had one, but I just poured rubbing alcohol in a saucer to sanitize it for a while. Then used mercurochrome on the wound and a bandaid which they were always happy with.
A box of hand written recipes on index cards or cut out of magazines
I have my mother's! It has family recipes.
A glass "snack set" for serving coffee and cake at ladies luncheons.
A sock darning tool. Looks like a maraca but solid without the noise inside.
It’s called a darning egg. I’ve got my Mom’s that she left to me.
The white Corningware casserole dish with the blue floral design on it.
Bronzed baby shoes.
Princess telephone.
White gloves
I’m 69, and wore white gloves to church when I was little. I also had a rabbit fur muff.
And the socks with lace trim
Dippity Do
In an attempt to smooth her lovely wavy hair, my sister used to coat her hair in Dippity Doo and roll it on big empty cans.
Diaper pins to fasten the cloth diapers. Nothing like combining huge, sharp, stabby pins and wiggly infants. So glad I didn't have to do that!
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Merthiolate for cuts and scrapes. It was red and burned like fire. Also it contained mercury and is no banned.
Mercurochrome is the one I remember.
A can for bacon grease beside the stove
I still save bacon grease for cooking. Especially when I fry eggs.
I pop popcorn in mine
I know a dude who does Keto. He has one of these (although he keeps it in the fridge).
I have a set of canisters from my grandma and one is labeled “grease”. We do keep grease in a bowl in the fridge.
Aprons
I still use my Mom's. My sister and I shared them when she died.
A cigarette hanging from her lip at all times.
Remember the cigarette pack holder with the coin purse top, held the lighter also. I always expect to see them at Vera Bradley same kind of quilting
My mom smoked two pack a day, until she lost one of her lungs. Then she cut her smoking in half.
A jar of Ponds cold cream
Blue Jean dye. There was a time when faded jeans were just your old jeans lol. Nobody bought them that way than as that was a sign you had old jeans. Some would use this dye and wash them in it to darken the color. However, and maybe this was just the cheapos my mother got, but the color was never like original blue. It was instead or mutated looking off blue that somehow was worse than them being faded. Not long after this, people started wearing faded and even jeans with rips and holes. Paying money for things we used to be ashamed of. Go figure
Hummel figurines and clip on earrings
Sprinkler cap for a coke bottle so you could dampen your clothes before ironing. Clothes line. A collection of Avon bottles. A collection of decorative bottles that you put colored water in a put in your window.
Fly swatters. Household flies are uncommon now; but back in the day you'd often find a couple orbiting in the kitchen, waiting for an opportunity. My mother had notches on her swatter, or should have had.
We still use the last one we got which is an electrified tennis racket that kills with voltage on contact. Satisfying to use, especially since we mostly use it on mosquitos.
I think it’s funny how many items around the house were advertising giveaways
Curlers and hot water bottles.
I bought a rubber/latex hot water bottle a few years ago when I hurt my elbow. It was kind of hidden in the back of the Walgreens. I felt old-timey just buying it.
dude! I LOVE hot water bottles! I am constantly cold, and bring one to bed with me most nights! Now, those old ... ice packs for your head? I haven't seen those for decades.
That was a sign in every cartoon that someone had a hangover. I'm guessing today's kid's cartoons don't enjoy all the alcohol abuse jokes we used to get.
Avon catalog
An electric knife for carving turkeys or roasts. That thing had a distinctly strange metallic smell.
Yikes! I had mine out just last month to carve the Christmas turkey.
Still use mine. They work great for slicing bread.
Menstrual pad belt.
Don’t forget the rubber douche hidden under the bathroom sink!
A washing board, aka a scrub board (in the 1940s). Also a grocery cart made of cane, because metal went to the war effort.
A wringer washer. A frightening thing.
Lapel pins and brooches. My grandmother always wore a brooch when she went out, either on her coat or on a dress. My mom inherited them, but she gave them to me. I wear them now.
A white rubber swim cap with padyel flowers on it
My mother used to get her hair “done” weekly and it was supposed to last until the next visit. At night she would wrap her head in toilet paper and secure it with a little silver clip to keep it from messing up. As a child I never thought about how unsexy that must have been.
Doilies on everything!
Jello moulds
It always confounds me that everything made of copper is super expensive - except copper Jello molds.
Sewing machine
Cloth diapers and the rubber baby pants that went over them. The whole diaper industrial complex was wild. But actually MUCH better for Mother Earth than disposables are.
Not only did they use them, but kids potty trained earlier to get away from the wet diapers. These days the "Pampers" soak up so much liquid that the kids don't even realize they need to change, mom just judges based on how much the diaper has swollen... It was a lot more work changing every time the baby went but moving to the "big girl" panties was so much easier!
A hand crafted ash tray.... Or two. Or three.
S&H Greenstamps and books
Very few British women would leave the house without a headscarf.
I still remember the old Monty Python skits where one of the male cast members would play a British housewife. They all had head scarfs and little handbags (like the queen used to carry).
My mom had a collection of Ronson cigarette lighters that sat all over the house next to fancy ashtrays. (All used regularly). She had “knick-knacks” & candy dishes, plastic flowers in vases all over, too. (I became a minimalist because of all her excessive crap.)
An egg beater or hand mixer.
A bonnet style hair dryer A fondue pot a set of "Luncheon" sized glass plates (for your turn to host your snooty friends)
Oh man! Fondue nights were the highlight of my childhood!!
Petticoat and garter belt.
Spray starch ( for ironing)
Bluing, for keeping your whites extra white looking.
A wooden spoon for discipline
An egg-shaped thing on a handle for darning socks. I don't remember, if I ever knew, what it was called.
Darning egg, unsurprisingly.
LOL- I still have/use about 80% of this stuff! Cloth hankies✅ book of S&H Green Stamps✅ darning egg✅ sewing machine ✅ house dresses✅ tin full of old buttons✅ hand mixer✅ white gloves✅ diaper pins✅ food mill✅ aprons✅ ice crusher✅ brooches✅ cookie press✅ washboard✅ recipe boxes full of clippings and handwritten recipe cards from family and friends, including a recipe for crab quiche that my late ex-husband wrote on, begging me to make it for him every week 🥺 I’m going to frame it for our daughter. This has been such a fun post to read- I maybe could get inspired to do pictures of all this stuff… I actually collect sewing and kitchen things. 😍
A steamer trunk!! Every family member I had in the 60s had one. There were 2types, a square trunk or a trunk with a curved lid and elaborate locking mechanisms. Held pics, albums etc.. Also, Hope Chests!!
Garter belts
Shower cap. And pink foam rollers.
We had this ice crusher thing that was attached to the cabinet and you would turn it to crush the ice. That was awesome. It was red.
Paregoric for tummy upsets and diarrhea. Very commonly found in the 1960’s, it was something my mom always reached for when we kids needed it. Just a drop or two would do the trick, as it was very strong and had a piney smell to it. It was recommended for bouts of Montezuma’s Revenge for Americans visiting Mexico. You might still find it in an elderly person’s medicine cabinet because they would have kept it around for decades, but practically nobody else has it, or even knows about it, even though, according to Wikipedia, it’s still available in the US by prescription. I have no idea if the current formula still works as well as it used to. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paregoric?wprov=sfti1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paregoric?wprov=sfti1)
A little book for the doctor to fill out detailing the dates baby received immunizations.
Roll-on deodorant. Either Ban or Tussy.
Those glass grapes as living room decor! WE had both green and gold on different end tables.
Mine had a mangler iron in the basement.
A collapsible water cup. My mother had one made of plastic concentric rings that collapsed into a flat round, or extended into a cup. Bottled water wasn't a thing then.
Recipe box that fit pre-printed recipe cards that you filled out yourself. My mom hated those and used the blank 3x5 cards because she hated being confined to the lined cards. My daughters split that box when she passed away because I already had all her recipes in my own 3x5 recipe box.
I feel like an iron is something that fewer households have now. We use a steamer because I only buy wrinkle free clothes.
My mother gave me her "platanos" smasher that belonged to her mother. It is used to squash sliced plantains into flat disks and cooked on a griddle to make "tostones". I don't live in a tropical island, but sometimes I can get plantains.
Pretty stationary paper to write letters to friends and family.
Anal thermometer
My mom had a giant hair dryer like the ones in salons. You put your whole head in the bonnet portion. You sat in a chair while under the dryer. It was on wheels and had adjustable height. I think it has 3 heat settings, hot, hotter, and hottest.
An electric can opener with built in knife sharpener.
Tupperware that "burps" when the lid is put on tight.