<p>My aunt would use a cookie cutter to make designs on the soap and use some beet juice to stain the soap red.Very fancy.</p>
<p>Allmusic: The heels of the bread are the best part! My parents were depression era. My dad used to enjoy a bowl of crumbled saltine crackers with milk for breakfast. Is that a northern thing, or just a grew up dirt poor after the stock market crash thing? He actually enjoyed Underwood deviled ham from a can. That might have been an acquired taste from WWII.</p>
<p>My mother always said eating the bread crusts would make your hair curly.</p>
<p>spinner, my grandmother said that, too. She lied.</p>
<p>Conyat, I’m here in Mobile, I hear you, I feel what you are saying. I’m remembering the relief run we made to Pensacola after Ivan, driving over bridges that hadn’t been certified to be safe, but were so far off the beaten path that the state hadn’t gotten over to close them yet (needed to leave it open for emergency vehicles). We have a little stock of MREs, too, and I keep a can of Anheuser-Busch water in the fridge just to remind me of how very fortunate we are.
I know the folks in Gretna took a lot of heat for trying to close the bridge, but you have to actually be in a situation where there is a breakdown of civil order, and you have some necessities of life that others don’t have to understand. It brings out unbelieveable acts of generosity, bravery and neighborliness, but don’t start coming toward people in a gang or mob - people will be edgy, and they might shoot first.
Is Slidell being rebuilt? I haven’t been over that way in awhile.</p>
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Bingo. I didn’t see my mother (or grandmother) as thrifty, but crafty. There was a certain amount of pride that came from being able to make something out of [seemingly] nothing.</p>
<p>As a child, I remember having to bring a home made ornament to the Christmas tree trim at church. My mother always made them out of a drapery ring or a jar lid, saved ribbon and whatever trinkets had fallen off Christmas cards or presents the year prior. These days, I’m sure kids in the same boat would go to Michael’s or A.C. Moore to buy a kit to make their “home made” ornament.</p>
<p>Dean J, I think it depends on how the kid was raised. My depression raised Mom saved everything and as a single Mom with 6 kids, she taught me to waste nothing. I save far too much but I am not as bad as my Mom. My kids were actually quite proud of the fact they didn’t use a kit for craft projects until the more affluent kids would make fun of them. Bet for their kids, they’ll buy some kits but as mine use to say when they were little “uniquefy it” from home stock stuff.</p>
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Hey, we do that for our tree. A nail, a hammer, and a jar lid can make for a great ornament (and a stencil if you’re artistically challenged like me).</p>
<p>My mother in law is a true southern woman, like me. She used to make Christmas gift labels/tags by cutting little motiffs out of last year’s Christmas cards!</p>
<p>I was born and raised in Alabama and now, as a long time Georgia resident, I can truly say that I am a Southern woman and very glad to be so. I am not all-consumed by my appearance, but I do not see a problem with trying to look my best when in public (not that I do all of the time, mind you!). I also think that civility in the guise of trying to speak patiently with someone with whom you might be annoyed is a good thing. I really do not see that there is much to be gained by “fussing” (as we say here!) if something does not go your way, nor certainly by telling anyone to (insert expletive here), as a previous poster suggested.</p>
<p>warblers, or take a picture of your child and paste it inside the jar lid. We have a bunch of those on our tree at Christmas, and they are some of my favorites. I get a tear in my eye at some of those pics :)</p>
<p>churchmusicmom - we always used last year’s Christmas cards for tags, too. But my parents are from Ireland, although my mom grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and all us kids grew up in Connecticut.</p>
<p>I’ll admit that I like to look my best when I head out the door, but that’s just for me, not to please anyone else.</p>
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<p>StickerShock, it was just the opposite for my dad. At one point when he was in the Azores during WWII, the supply boat was sunk, and they lived off canned (?)pineapple for weeks. He never touched pineapple again.</p>
<p>Cangel, Slidell is sort of a 50:50; some people have rebuilt completely and some haven’t started. A friend of mine and all his family were commercial crabbers, had been for generations. They lost it all in a few hours: homes, boats, business. All that’s left now is a little piece of chainlink fence and a plywood sign with my friend’s name and cell phone number. On a brighter note, this morning going to work, I noticed crab pots in the lake next to the Twin Spans, for literally the first time since the storm. So even though it’s not my friends, someone’s back.</p>
<p>BTW, one of the (many, many) things that still chokes me up involves Ivan survivors. To set this up: Two or three weeks after I was back in Slidell, caravans started coming from other places to help us or bring supplies, or passing through on the way to help others. At this point, just about every fire truck and law enforcement vehicle was from out of state, most of our things having been destroyed. Some of them were manned by out-of-towners there to help; others were donations that hadn’t been repainted yet.</p>
<p>Anyhow, one of the caravans was a bunch of SUVs with Alabama and Florida plates. Written in shoe polish on the windows of the vehicles was this: “Survivors of Ivan, Frances and Charlie for Survivors of Katrina.” I don’t even know where they went, or what they came to do, but it still gets me every time.</p>
<p>ETA: This just in. New Orleans coroner wants the neighborhood where I grew up searched for bodies; apparently it still hasn’t been searched systematically. They found 28 bodies between March 2006 and July 2006 in other hard hit neighborhoods, and there are still New Orleanians unaccounted for.</p>
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conyat, it is sad that we often tend to have an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality with our charity efforts. Only a hurricane survivor can really know how long term the recovery is. Aroud NYC, we are still reminded of 9/11 more often than the rest of the country because the kids & families of the victims are in our lives more directly and more often. Kind of like how many of us rush around at Christmas sending checks, buying gifts for shelter residents, stocking foodbanks. Year round consistency would be a better way.</p>