The Cost of Souvenirs
“Souvenirs are perishable; fortunately, memories are not” – Susan Spano
Last weekend, Jeanine and I cleaned the garage. We still can’t get two cars in the two-car garage, but it’s a two-part project to be continued this weekend. We did end up with a carload of “stuff” to take to Goodwill. As we were loading the Volvo, Jeanine noted there was enough merchandise for a garage sale. The saying goes, “Never say never.” But I’m N-E-V-E-R having another garage sale in my lifetime. I belong to the Suze Orman school of thought on this topic. Donate and take the tax deduction.
She writes, “Financially speaking, I can’t make any sense out of garage sales. You have to invest a lot of time to hold one, when you could simply take all your unwanted stuff down to the local charity (or even ask them to come cart it away for you) and claim the donation as a tax deduction. Do you really want to spend a weekend holding a garage sale-with no guarantee you will clear out everything you don’t want-when you can spend an hour or two gathering up your stuff and making a donation whose tax value will likely exceed the value of your garage sale’s proceeds?” In less than 20 minutes, I was there and back (with receipt in hand) and the garage is one step closer to housing the Volvo.
One of the items that didn’t get carted off to Goodwill was the piece of pottery pictured above. Jeanine started to put it in the pile and I said, “You’ve got be kidding me.” It’s not that I love the bowl… after all; it does have a picture of a moose on it. Rather, it represents something that Jeanine just had to buy to commemorate our summer trip to Jackson Hole in 2005.
I live by the motto of Jeanine’s ex-girlfriend (now her best friend — it’s a lesbian thing, trust me, straight people can’t relate to this one). Debbie is around for Jeanine but I get to benefit from her quippish observations that I steal and elevate as rules to live by. She’s especially helpful when it comes to anything related to fashion and decor. Debbie says, “Most things purchased on vacation don’t translate once they are home.” In other words, the Hawaiian shirt bought in Honolulu doesn’t make sense back in Topeka and the trinket from Costa Rica looks silly sitting on the dresser in Danbury.
So… whenever we are traveling and Jeanine has the urge to purchase a memory, I remind her of the Debbie rule. The moose bowl was one such item and even though we were in our woodsy mode inspired by the views of the Grand Tetons, I knew for sure that it wasn’t going to “translate” back home in Newport. But $69 later, Jeanine was having the bowl boxed up in the gift shop.
We never argue about money. We do disagree from time to time. Mostly it stems from these types of purchases. In my opinion, it’s not worth a fight or even a discussion… rather, it’s easier to just let Jeanine be Jeanine. After all, she was being sentimental by wanting something to cherish our vacation. I would never want to squash this romantic expression. For this reason, I probably even offered to buy the bowl. I don’t quite remember.
But buying the bowl and getting rid of the bowl are two different things. We are going to enjoy that damn bowl forever! It’s a matter of principle. The bowl is back in the house looking silly as ever.
Does anyone have any souvenir regrets they want to share? I’m always looking for examples to build my “it doesn’t translate” case.
My niece and I bought several of those incredibly cheap bead necklaces (strung on fishing line, no less) during a vacation in Hawaii. They looked great at the resort hanging around in flip flops; they completed our wannabe Hawaiian surfer outfits. However, they look really stupid in New Jersey, even at the beach.
But I don’t regret it. I have a special drawer for souvenirs, and whenever I open it, there are my beady necklaces. At $3 a piece, it’s a pretty cheap memory.
About ten years ago I started buying earrings as souvenirs. It means I’ve got a tangible connection to the holiday, but it’s not clutter! On a recent trip to Brazil I couldn’t find earrings that I liked (business trip, limited shopping opportunities), so I bought a shawl, which I can also use as a scarf in winter.
It gets nicely over the translation issues.
I try and stick to useful items that I will actually use, like coffee/tea mugs. The only kitschy thing I go for is magnets, which are cheap and look great in the laundry room on my IKEA magnet board.
Years before it became cool, I was a scrapbooker. We grab up free pamphlets, travel info, paper junk from wherever we go- and occasionally buy a postcard or two. I combine this stuff w/ any pictures we take on our trips rather than buying all the stickers and specialty papers that are out there. Granted, a lot of this is acid free, low-lignin quality paper- but do I really need my scrapbooks to survive into the next millenia? I use good scrapbooking pages and put good quality plastic covering over my completed pages. The tough part is I do end up hauling home usually an extra canvas bag full of paper paraphernalia- when I end up using very little. It helps to have more rather than less to make an aesthetically pleasing collage tho’!
We usually allow the kids to lick one item for souvenirs nowadays- DivaJayne usually picks something doll related or a necklace. My son Buddy typically will choose a book or dvd about where we’ve been. And Baby is only 18 months- and doesn’t really notice the whole buying/accumulating stuff process yet. I can’t complain too much about their choices…
Oops- that would be “pick an item” not “lick an item” in my last paragraph. I really should check my writing more carefully.
The first time I went to Europe I returned only with a small bag of candied roses. Everyone mercilessly made fun of my lack of acquisitions. But I ate the tasty little things and was done with it!
I agree that most of what you buy on vacaction doesn’t translate. Lord knows I have enough untranslatable stuff that my parents have brought back!
Our solutions:
We allow ourselves to buy 1 piece of art from a local artist when we go on a big trip. Art is a slightly flexible term for us: on a trip to Portugual my partner picked up some painted tiles that we incorporated into our bathroom. On another trip to Hawaii, we chose out our wedding rings. It keeps us from over-buying, and forces us to think hard about our purchase. We get over our kitch longings by implementing the next solution.
The other thing we do is that every time we go on vacation, we buy a Christmas Tree ornament to represent the trip. Our tree is eclectic and full of stories, the souvenirs get packed away every year, we can buy the more outrageous things that don’t translate well with our normal decor, and we have a lot of fun picking our decoration out. We look forward to our kids helping us choose the decoration when they get old enough…
Just an observation on the garage sale thing-DH and I own our house outright, so we don’t have a mortgage to write off, so most of the time our “charity” contributions don’t add up to enough to be more than the standard deduction. In that case donations to things like the goodwill actually don’t net us ANYTHING, where as a yard sale at least brings in some cash.
Just a thought!
We decided on our honeymoon that we did not want to be a family full of kitchy souveneirs (ala our parents), so we made a big decision: Smooshed Pennies. Sound silly? We thought so, but everywhere we go that has a penny smoosher (you know, the little machine in the corner of gift shops that you feed .76 and get a smooshed penny with a design on it?), we fish for change and giggle like little kids when the machine smooshes our penny. We have a box of them now, with the date and place scratched into the back by my husband’s pocket knife. About every 6 months or so, we open the box and go through memories. very cheap, lots of fun, and when we have kids, we’ll have the added benefit of lots of embarrassment when Mom and Dad go nuts over a penny smoosher. It may not translate, but one day we’ll go somewhere and buy a nice box for all those little memories.