@Mominohio wrote:
@sfnative wrote:
@SHOPR wrote:
@sfnative, I can sense your enthusiasm to get in there and decorate after all this time. I hope you find all of your decorations to be in good shape and that you have so much fun using them again.
Hi SHOPR,
You know, I tried to explain this to my husband and he was totally clueless. Couldn't understand where I was coming from.
When I was in college in the late 60s/early 70s, they were just starting to address the REAL differences between women and men in a number of classes I took. I recall reacting at the time "of course, of course, of course," to numerous "new" givens that to me were long-held truths. Perhaps I was ahead of my time.
There are some things that women simply do/need/practice/breathe-to-live and one of those for me has always been to create a warm holiday or seasonal mood in our home. Having not been able to do this for 15 years has left such a void - I cannot put it into words. It's part of my psyche, my heart and soul and is not part of the surface of my life. Unfortuntely, it was not financially possible to replace the objects in storage (long story) and to make things worse, our things were in storage half way across the country. It wasn't until the last 3 years that things started to fall into place.
I'll be so happy, once our move is complete at the end of August and can get into our things which have finally been relocated to a new storage unit located about 10 miles down the road. I feel fortunate, as many who suffered through the dot com downturn and 2 recessions and ended up in minimal pay jobs, as did my husband (from 6 figures), will never ever recover. We have been blessed to move forward thanks in part to my job during this challenging time.
So, now that I've bored you all to death, I'm so happy to be able to "make a home" again and to find such inspiration here. Thank you!
@sfnative
It just breaks my heart to read about your situation. I have many female friends who don't 'get' my need to make a nice home. They don't understand anyone who loves to clean, cook, decorate, and create a home environment that is special and loved.
They see their things as just that 'things' and have no emotional attachment to grandmas Bible, or Aunt Lucy's hand made quilt. They care about functionality only (not that that isn't important) but seem to have no real emotion in their homes.
I hope with your move, you can begin again what you have always loved. I am so excited for you, as it seems you are embarking on a new adventure. Please share with us the steps as you move along. We are all so very interested and happy for you.
Hi mominohio,
Thanks for visiting my "piece." I feel very strongly about "our things" and what they mean to us.
I had an dear Aunt, one of 4 sisters to my mother, who was blessed in the needle arts and inspired me in that regard. She made so many beautiful things for me which I will pass onto my daughter. Each time we move, my husband makes faces about Aunt June's lovely creations and I have to simply tell him that I was lucky enough to have such a kind and caring Aunt who also shared recipes with me cross country, so kindly shut up, OK? This Aunt also had made for me special diamond and ruby earrings upon the passing of my mother. Red was my Aunt's favorite color and diamonds to rememeber my mother. This was a woman who had had 2 boys, so I was fortunate to be the recipient of may lovely gifts.
On the other hand, one year when my daughter was about 4, I made a Halloween purchase for our breakfast room. We had a 5 globe light fixture with a finial hanging off the bottom. Off of this finial I hung our new bat! It was one of those heavy card stock things with a honeycomb body, so that when you opened it up the body was puple and everything else was black with yellow/orange eyes, etc. It was pretty simple at $1.99. Then the remainder of the fixture had like spiders hanging off of it, with some spider webbing going up the chain. After years and years and years of using that bat, which also received some abuse because it hang right over our food, so had many loving pats, we just had to say good-bye to it and my daughter cried(!) She's now 38 and every Halloween mentions her favorite bat! Never says anything about the rest of the house, but oh boy, she loved that bat. Just look at what you can do with $1.99!
Edited to add: We vacationed in Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland in 1988. While in Vienna, where everything hand carved is extremely expensive, I finally found a piece to purchase: a putti - a beautiful angel carved and painted in th Baroque style. She's been "asleep" in storage all these years and I'm finally going to get to see her, hold her and hang her once again. I am absolutely thrilled! No, I'm not crazy, just really, really excited, as I have a number of angels and she's my favorite, once again to surface. Yay!
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