Surprise Spoon
Posted by in Collecting
My grandmother traveled to every continent except Antarctica (and I’ll bet if they had had the cruises they do now, she would have gone there as well). My grandmother was a collector. She collected Depression glass, cut crystal, milk glass, spoons from her travels, and dolls from her travels. The dolls have a special place in my heart and I hope to soon be posting about them. She left all of them to me and they have been in a cardboard box in my closet, waiting for a case to display them in (they’ll be waiting a bit longer as I haven’t found anything yet that is right). I recently decided to move them to a plastic storage box. When I did so, at the bottom of the doll box, there was a piece of tissue paper. I picked it up and it had some weight to it. I unwrapped it and found this spoon.
It’s a deep-bowled spoon, the kind used in Chinese restaurants for soup. I’m guessing she brought it back from Japan since that is the only country I know of that she visited where she might have gotten something like this. There are no markings on the back.
I was delighted to find one more gift from her after all these years. Moving the dolls had made me miss her terribly and this gave me one more link to her. I’ll never know for certain where the spoon came from, but I’ll always cherish it.
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What a wonderful find! I have a feeling I will be running across some things like this when we go through the boxes in our storage area again. There’s a lot of stuff of my mom’s up there.
I ended up finding something else as well – horsehair flowers from Chile. I hope you find some unexpected treasures too!
Very sweet. How nice to have her special things.
Always a nice memory to have something that once belonged to someone you loved. I have a few things of my grandmother’s – including a lamp – and I feel her presence whenever I touch them.
Ironically, some of the lovely gifts we receive outlive the givers and leave wonderful memories.
Sounds like there are some stories here that would fit in my new website, Ancestors in Aprons! I love the way objects and foods take us spiraling back to memories of those who went before.
Your grandmother would have loved the painted wooden spoon I brought home from Aland (an island technically part of Finland, but settled by Swedes.)
Yes, she would have. She went to Finland and Sweden and brought home a doll and both my grandparents bought sweaters there. Someday I hope to visit. I just love trip mementos!
Such a sweet find, Brette. It’s so nice that you have so many momentos from her trips. We use the Chinese soup spoons all the time here – they’re so much better than stainless steel spoons when the soup is hot!
It’s funny, you see these a lot now in restaurants for one bite appetizers. I never thought about the heat as a factor in using them for soup!
How lovely to find something like this that reminds you of her, Brette.
My mother used to have a collection of those kinds of spoons too. I always felt like it made soup taste even better when you used one of those spoons.
I love stuff like that. It’s like wonder and love handed down through the generations.
I have a lot of my grandmother’s stuff, and it’s so fun to find cool vintage stuff.