So a friend of mine was telling me about this one strange thing his wife does. Whenever they get a gift of *food* and ONLY food (eg like a basket of cheese and crackers) she immediately goes about dividing it EXACTLY in half. "this is my part of the cheddar, this is yours" he isn't bothered about it just a little confused.
She told him. "If you had siblings you'd understand."
I suggested he may eat all the cheese and not notice.
Can those with siblings speak on this? Are you traumatized?
@futurebird At our house it was my dad & his "only 1 kind of jelly can be open at a time" and since we weren't well-off he bought HUGE jars of jelly. Grape for months.
When my middle sister grew up, the very first thing she did when she got her own place was buy 2 jars of jelly and open them both.
Yeah. My parents would only let me use like two of the scissors and hid the nice ones and wouldn't buy the scissors I wanted as a gift because "you have scissors" (even told other people not to get them for me since I had them already)
They came over one day and noticed that I have a big vase and it's full of every kind of scissor, every color and size...
"so, that really was a big deal I guess" my mom said ... I hadn't even really noticed the connection. But it WAS.
@futurebird @epicdemiologist
As far as I knew, there was only one pair of scissors ever in the house I grew up in. Finding them when they were needed a frequent source of drama, sturm, und drang.
It remains a thing of family legend how my sister, who was really into sewing, painstakingly saved up her babysitting money (allowances were not a thing in our household) until she could buy herself a pair of proper dressmaker's shears - and then my father, unable to locate the communal family scissors, took the dressmaker's shears out of my sister's sewing box and used them to cut fiberglass cloth.
I have a pair of scissors in every room of my house, two in the kitchen, three (each for a different purpose) in my own sewing box, and one more that lives in the box of gift wrap.
Shower your kids with scissors, folks.
@aSweetGentleman @futurebird @epicdemiologist
I was thinking about scissors-related folklore.
There's a Chinese superstition that dropping a pair of scissors brings bad luck. In "The Joy Luck Club," someone knocks over a whole table stacked with scissors; and her luck promptly goes straight to hell.
An Irish superstition holds that, if someone gives you a blade as a gift, you must give them a coin (at least a small one); or else the friendship might be cut short. (That's just a blade, though - I suppose for scissors, you'd have to give them two coins.)
In Greek/Roman mythology, the third of The Three Sisters of Fate cuts the thread representing a person's life - with, of course, scissors.
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