Holiday Furniture and Timeless Traditions

With the New Year and other holidays around the corner, the time has come to start shopping for new furniture for your house, but before you go out and buy the cheapest brands which will only need replacing before you get them in the door, consider a little story about some Amish furniture in my great-grandmother’s salon.

The memory of my great grandmother has remained with me for a number of reasons. As children, my siblings and I would go over to her house and she would always welcome us with coconut cookies and ginger ale in her hand. Like her cookies, her house had a distinctive flavor, and the memory of both has remained permanently in my mind to this day. In particular, her old dining room hutch has left a lasting impression in my thoughts, a timeless memory which I will always cherish. That hutch was the one piece of furniture in her house that my sisters and I absolutely adored, and the one piece that my great-grandmother wouldn’t allow us to touch. She used to keep these interesting glass figurines in there, which we used to stare at for hours with wonder. Handed down to her from her mother, the hutch in her salon was exquisite, a solid piece of oak with a beautiful finish, and it stood as testimony to the ageless arts of long ago. 

As things turned out however, my grandma’s house one day caught fire; I guess she had left the burner on or at least that’s what I was told, and the rest of the house burnt down with it. Fortunately my grandmother wasn’t home at the time, but unfortunately the house was lost and the hutch with it, a fact that her daughter and my grandmother would complain about for many years after. 

At any rate, when I got older, for some reason that hutch kept coming into my mind—perhaps it was simply the memories of my great-grandmother, who can say? Well one day while walking by an Amish handcrafted furniture store looking in the window somewhat nostalgically, all of a sudden I saw the hutch! I paused in astonishment, then took out my cell phone and called my sister up who, just as excited as me, came down immediately to the store to see the piece for herself.

I ended up buying the hutch, which fortunately wasn’t too expensive since it happened to be a wholesale Amish furniture store. To this day, it sits in my own salon with a strange and uncanny feel which reminds me of the presence of my late great-grandmother. It’s a bit of history sitting there to remind me of the good times gone by.

Holiday season is around the corner, and you are about to go out and buy something new. What will you choose? I urge you not to throw away your money on trifle things that will wear out in a year. Buy something timeless, and surely, like my great-grandmother’s Amish hutch, timelessness will become a part of your living room.