Sentimental keepsakes

[3DOCTORS]

Another good idea - give consumables - candy, flowers, bubble bath, movie/concert tickets, a nice bottle of wine - whatever your recipient would go for. And don’t go overboard on the wrapping or “commemorative edition” containers for same, either. These are the kinds of items I wish people will get me now, rather than knickknacks. I even would prefer not to receive paper greeting cards anymore, only e-cards. That would help me with my indecision/keeping too much stuff. Maybe it will help you or someone you know.

 

[Kelfa28]

Hubby and I are the exact opposite.

We are so anti-stuff it’s easy to let things some people would normally treasure just fly out the window in the garbage or recycling bin.

I have a handful of things that I’ve kept but most of it is gone. I have ultra-sound pics but I realized I also gave away my daughter’s “coming home” outfit at the last Church yard sale. I also tossed her hospital band and the measuring tape they used to measure her length.

Honestly if something isn’t put in a scrap book, photo album or is framed…it’s going in the trash.

Hubby is worse then me. I firmly believe he’d toss our wedding pictures without noticing if he did spring cleaning.

 

[TheRealJuliane]

Hubby and I are the exact opposite.

We are so anti-stuff it’s easy to let things some people would normally treasure just fly out the window in the garbage or recycling bin.

I have a handful of things that I’ve kept but most of it is gone. I have ultra-sound pics but I realized I also gave away my daughter’s “coming home” outfit at the last Church yard sale. I also tossed her hospital band and the measuring tape they used to measure her length.

Honestly if something isn’t put in a scrap book, photo album or is framed…it’s going in the trash.

Hubby is worse then me. I firmly believe he’d toss our wedding pictures without noticing if he did spring cleaning.

Wow. Well, I hope you people have excellent memories and never forget anything!

At least you don’t have one of you fighting to keep stuff and the other one ripping it out of his/her hands to throw away!

 

[chevalier]

Just curious, but how do others feel about keeping sentimental things around. I live in a small appartment and there really is barely enough room for the essentials. I like to stock up when things are on sale. (I have a tight budget after all) and a lot of my closet/cupboard space goes to non-perisahble items, cosmetics and cleaning supplies I buy on sale and know I will eventually use

Also, I am NOT a good house keeper and I find the more items I have the harder it is for me to keep my place looking welcoming to visitors. I actually purposely NEVER have anyone over because my place just doesn’t look good.

Well, my mom just sent me 6 boxes of stuff since she sold her house. Believe it or not, in the stack of paper’s was a bus schedule from 1964 ! I wasn’t even born then.

Other things I didn’t even know she had. There were 6 cards congratulating her on my birth, as well as a plastic baggy with some of the hair from my first hair cut ! When I first saw that, I was about to take a fly swater to it until I realized what it was

I must admit, it was fun to look at my school report card from 1978 but are these items really necessary ?

So what do others do with sentimental things?

CM

I have plenty of pictures of once-fashionable cars that were used as playing cards when I was younger (you’d call out specific car parameters and compare just like the seniority of a card in a traditional set). A collection of sea-shells, many of which from my mother. Two albums of coins that I began to collect while emulating my step-father. Pictures painted by my own father but not displayed. Some old religious items. Perhaps a picture of grannie when she was little older than I am now. A law book from before WW2. Ancient pieces of computer hardware (I own >20 PC keyboards among other things, one of which is my step-father’s, I grew up with it). A sword I brought from a journey (which might have been illegal). An old passport. Quite a number of things from my earlier days and even childhood. Mostly no painful associations. Those things generally just sit there, I don’t take them out and look at them (with some exceptions) but it would hurt to dispose of them. Certainly not to the garbage! Even burning them would be better than that. I can burn memories but not garbage them.

On the other hand, on the top of my bookshelf and collecting dust I have three framed pictures of the most attractive woman to me ever, in many ways a woman after my own heart; an actually short acquaintance with a semi-tragic romantic bent that I still haven’t recovered from, no matter the active part of it lasted for February and March of 2010 and I’ve even had some interest in or even feelings for others in the meantime. The pictures (of her and me on the court steps after a lost pro se final appeal that I defended like a lion against the Attorney General and she risked the ire of the justices by making commotion in the court room to pass some information to me, an uncharacteristic act of devotion) are conveniently out of my sight and collecting dust there but I can’t get myself to burn or just shred them and reuse the frames. Looking at the face again would be too much for me, even though by now I would be unable to recognise her out in the street. (At any rate those pictures will not survive my wedding day if any, this is the limit of their reprieve.)

I also have a silver bracelet from a former best friend and girlfriend from my university years. The bracelet sat in the drawer of my desk until I got a new desk a while ago (for the record, that old desk was a keepsake itself; I got it from my mother when I went to primary school at age 8). It’s still there where the desk is. I’ve needed to abdicate the ownership of it (bracelet, not desk) for years now and I’ve decided, out of respect, to give it to a young niece or someone else who means something to me (who does not need to know the history ofit) but if that will not work, then it will become a charity donation, so that a poor girl can have it–equally if not more respectful as far as my opinion counts. The letters have gone to the shredder, though, no exceptions.

For all this sentimentality, I still find it freeing to stop clinging to certain things. Not by throwing them away, absolutely, but by giving them to someone who might find use of them. This is tricky, though. What you give away or especially destroy, you can’t get back.

I also find that I never really look at pictures from journeys. Maybe one day if I have an empty wall to hang them on. But it’s not like I ever browse the directory on my hard drive they’re in. It’s enough that I know they are there.