Clothes

     Fortunately for us, hand-me-downs no longer have the social stigma they had when I was a child (which was a very long time ago, by the way).When I was young and the oldest of five children, clothes were not a big priority in my family’s budget. Fortunately, uniforms were worn in public elementary schools where I grew up in Quebec, so that alleviated a lot of pressure on our family budget. In those good old days, my mother was allotted a certain amount of cash money and had to make that money stretch as far as she could. She called it her housekeeping money. It seems a far cry from the way people manage money these days, with credit and debit cards. No wonder many of us now live beyond our means. Now my girls get clothes from friends and cousins--- even a much anticipated box of clothes from a well-to-do cousin who lives in Dallas, Texas, several times a year. When we are done with our clothes we pass them on to younger cousins or sometimes friends. It’s a great system. In our case, it involved the one-time purchase of quite a few of those big blue Rubbermaid tubs; one season’s clothes are put away and the appropriate ones brought out. Sometimes they still fit the following year, and sometimes they get passed on. Sometimes they are greeted like old friends with great memories attached to them and sometimes they end up as a rag in Dad’s workshop. Either way, this has saved us a great deal of money and my kids have had plenty of clothes, for which we are eternally grateful.