You know every homemaker worth her salt these days seems to be constantly decluttering.
A society that has too much, buys too much and then packs it all up, gives it away and goes off to get some more.
In days gone by things were kept in case they came in useful , and often they did.
The deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II meant that whatever things people had they truly valued, they were cared for and when they no longer served their original purpose they were used for something else, taken apart for spare parts, chopped up and remade and given a new life.
People didn't have as many things and things were precious.
This is my parent's generation, children of the Depression, teenagers during the war.
Baby boomers get really bad press you know for being over indulged by post war parents, it supposedly made us selfish and gave us an attitude of privilege.
There are so many generalisations about each generation, so I am going to join in.
Baby boomer children were loved and seen as very precious, as hope for a better brighter future.
Years of social unrest and war had made our parents determined to give us a childhood that was as perfect as they could manage.
We were well fed,
well dressed,
well educated.
We enjoyed freedoms in our childhood that for today's generation of parents seem more like willful neglect.
But we did know about respect and good manners and sharing and all those good things.
Mostly we had parents who let us get on with being children.
That many of these children went on to rebel and perhaps reject their parents social values was in many ways to be expected.
But not every baby boomer chose the anti social path and many who experimented in other ways of living eventually grew up and came to appreciate what was good about their early years.
The baby boomer child hood years were the start of all this stuff, of mass advertising coming into our homes and trying to convince us all that life would be complete with the latest and greatest.
The adult baby boomers and their offspring are forever trying to unload all their stuff.
Thank goodness for the past generation that managed to keep some of our history because I fear the decluttering bug will rid the world of any trace of our children's personal histories as we down size and cast off all those bits and pieces along the way.
When we were children we kept all our birthday cards and during the school holidays we would stick them into scrap books, not fancy scrap albums like today with all the little stickers and bits and pieces.
It was not an activity supervised by an adult.
We used a cheap scrap book with cheap paper.
My brother also kept a scrap book with lolly wrappers in it, my cousin had one too, I must look for that at mum's.
So, although my mother has tossed out a lot of stuff she has kept these albums, she has kept so much that was precious to us from our childhood and I am so grateful and mindful of this when I decide to get rid of what seems like clutter in my own home.
Careful sorting is what is needed ,careful buying too so that things have a chance to be precious.
A surplus of anything can lead to it being devalued.
The cards you see here today are my favourites from my 1st, 2nd and 3rd birthdays, 1960, 1961 and 1962.
My children have similar scrap books for their cards - I guess that makes it a family tradition.
This over indulged baby boomer is glad she had parents determined to make the world a better place the only way they knew how,
by treasuring their children and their children's treaures,
making certain we knew we were loved,
every day,
in every way.
You can see more of my cards
here
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