Goodwill Hunting: How do ya like dem jars?

After a month of buying nothing new, I'm still a consumer. And limiting myself to second hand shopping might have made me an even more excited consumer because now when I find something really good at a second hand store I feel like I've made a major accomplishment. It's the thrill of the search! Being the child of a museum curator and archivist has given me the interest in pawing through the remnants of other peoples lives to piece together a glimpse of their personalities. I suppose my brief stint in archaeology was fitting as well. Digging through stacks of used stuff is almost as fun as slowly scraping away layers of soil to expose the day-to-day realities of former civilizations. Or perhaps more fun, for some.

Last week SteadyJ and I headed to Goodwill to procure some sweet threads for an 80s themed Birthday Party. In the first 10 minutes he found some killer acid wash jeans and I found perhaps the most hideous/awesome lavender polyester pant suit with a sort of disco meets the Golden Girls vibe. They proved successful garb for the party, in fact, I would go on to say that we got more double takes than any other couple in the place. Sidenote: If you ever have the chance to attend the 80s Video Dance Attack at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, OR, you should do it.

Our Goodwill experience wasn't just successful because of the costume finds - of course we had to browse for a few minutes! I was walking through the kitchen items when I noticed a low shelf full of canning jars. Now, Goodwill probably has these all the time, but I hardly have given them much notice in the past. But this time I spotted some of the really old Ball and Atlas wire bail canning jars with the glass lids. Major score! I love these old jars! Here is A Brief History of the Home Canning Jar found on the pickyourown.org website:

Clamped Glass-Lid Jars (Lightning Jars)

In 1882, Henry William Putnam of Bennington, Vermont, invented a fruit jar that used a glass lid and a metal clamp to hold the lid in place. These "Lightning jars" became popular because no metal (which could rust, breaking the seal or contaminating the food) contacted the food and the metal clamps made the lids themselves easier to seal and remove (hence the "Lightning" name) . There were many similar glass lid and wire-clamp jars produced for home canning all the way into the 1960s. Many can still be seen in garage sales, flea markets and on specialty food jars today.

Well hot damn. The glass jars I got could range in age from 50 to 100 years old given that they have patent dates of 1908 on them. I'm really not sure how old they are. There was a bit of rust on the bailing wires, but I took them off and hit them with some steel wool and now they are looking sharp! For three jars I paid about $7, which isn't bad for jars that will probably last my entire life!

This past November I was visiting some family friends in Vancouver, BC and I had a great conversation with my mom's best buddy Linda about disposable life styles. Linda and her husband have been working to consume less over the past few years, downsizing their life from a house to an apartment and selling one car along the way. Their son, Evan, has been working to start his own business helping people make their urban homes sustainable. The interesting thing that came out of our conversation is that basically, we all should be living more like our great-grandparents did in order to have sustainable lifestyles. Growing a lot of our own food and preserving it, collecting our rain water, entertaining ourselves at home, listening to the radio as opposed to spending a lot of time online (ironic for a blogger to say, I know), and truly weighing the importance of use of time and money in relation to wants versus needs. It would be ignorant for me to sit here and glorify the hard lives that made most of my great grandparents flee their homelands and seek the opportunities in the United States. The point I'm trying to make is that I think past generations gave a lot more thought to their consumption, mainly because they had to in order to survive. And my guess is that glass canning jars just like my Goodwill finds were seen as valuable tools to their sustainable survival.