Last year my Uncle Chuck passed away. He was an amateur gourmet cook and collected many fine cooking and serving items. He lived alone and had no children, so it was up to my mom to divvy up his small estate. Last year, shortly after his death she gave me a box full of Chuck’s copper cookware which I subsequently spent an afternoon cleaning and then put away and have never used. It probably needs to be cleaned again by now.
My mother also gave me some of Uncle Chuck’s wine goblets and a matching tall glass decanter/ snifter/spigot? I don’t know what it is called, but when she gave me these wine goblets, I was not very excited about them. As you can see they are rather ornate and decorated in gold and purple leaves and they are about half the size of a normal wine glass and well… I am not really a gold and purple, ornate tiny wine goblet, kind of a girl. So I stored them in my hutch wondering what in the world to do with them and then one evening last Fall, I was adding some white wine to whatever it was I was cooking and I thought it would be nice to have a small glass of this wine while I cooked and so I reached up to the hutch to get a glass, and I saw Uncle Chuck’s goblets and they were the perfect size for my wine craving! And that’s how my Uncle Chuck’s ornate, purple and gold tiny wine goblets became my favorite wine glasses ever! Not only do they allow for a perfectly small glass of wine while one is cooking, but it is much easier to justify second, third and fourth glass of wine! Believe it or not, I even used that tall wine ‘snifter, decanter, spigot thingy’ this Christmas when I made Nigella Lawson’s filthy fizz. At this point, I have probably used Uncle Chuck’s tiny wine goblets more than Uncle Chuck ever did!
But that’s not all!
Heavens NO!
Because my mother kept telling me that she had a few more wine glasses to give me. At first I wasn’t very keen on getting more of those tiny purple and gold goblets, but as my perspective changed, I became very interested in having as many of those tiny goblets as I could get my hands on.
So when my mom called and told me to meet her on the highway where she would hand over my wine glasses on her way to her new home in Topeka, I obediently schlepped out to the junction of highway 99 and Interstate 70 to get my loot! But my mom was not exactly telling the whole truth about the wine glasses because when I showed up, she began unloading box after box after box for me to take to my house.
“Mom!” I exclaimed. “What is all this stuff?”
“It’s your wine glasses.” she said.
“What! Uncle Chuck had five huge boxes of wine glasses?” I asked.
“Oh.” she said, “It’s not all wine glasses. There’s some other things in there I thought you might like.”
“You mean like this hideous quilted doll?” I asked her as I pulled out a craft item from the early 80′s.
“Now Rechelle!” she said. “You go through these boxes and whatever you don’t like, you can just get rid of it.”
“Why don’t you get rid of it and where are my dang wine glasses?!?” Is what I wanted to say, but I held my tongue and loaded all that crap into the back of my van while mentally shaking my fist at my mother for tricking me into throwing out the stuff that she couldn’t bear to throw out herself.
When I got home, I dragged those boxes indoors and stared at them bleakly. Judging from the quilted doll, I was terrified at what else I might find. The first few boxes contained all of my mom’s old chipped dishes. Thanks mom. Thanks for these old chipped dishes! Love them! Love them so much! I sat the chipped dishes aside for the Salvation Army and opened the next box…
.
.
.
.
.
And that is when I started to find wine glasses.
More wine glasses than I would have ever dreamed.
Each glass in this photo has a set of six to eight glasses that match.
I eventually found over fifty wine glasses in those boxes.
Fifty Wine Glasses!
What was my Uncle Chuck doing with fifty wine glasses?
What am I going to do with fifty wine glasses???!!!???
And then I got to this box.
My Uncle Chuck’s silverware… or goldware… or gold colored silverware…
It’s real pretty, but it’s not really me.
Then again, neither were those tiny wine goblets…
Oh dear!
After unpacking all that stuff, I had to find space in my hutch to put it away.
Because it’s nice to have over fifty wine glasses handy just in case fifty wine drinkers show up at my house at the same time.
Hopefully they will bring their own wine.
So I rearranged the hutch and put the ‘goldware’ on a shelf in the living room because the box is attractive and I don’t know what else to do with it.
I think I need to throw a party and use all this stuff at the same time.
Fancy wine glasses… gold silverware…
Will I need to hire an orchestra for this party??
And can I use the doll for a centerpiece?
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