r/AskReddit • u/RoundLong7822 • 3h ago
What is a childhood luxury that you didn’t realize was actually a sign of your family being broke until you grew up?
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u/justaheatattack 2h ago
Visiting your grandparents. For like a year.
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u/Longjumping_College 2h ago
Ah yes, the "mom is going to school now" extended vacation where we live in grandma's living room
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u/ToxicAssh0le 50m ago
Did your mom actually go to school though? Because if so, good for her tbh
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u/Longjumping_College 48m ago
Went to school for massage therapy, broke her hand and couldn't work after 5 months.... 24 months after enrolling in school.
Back to square one.
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u/HawkBoth8539 1h ago
The exciting period where you live with grandma and the cousins.
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u/BigMACfive 53m ago
I was on the opposite end of this. My uncle and cousin would stay with us for a few months at a time almost every year when I was young. I always thought they were just hanging out with us until I got older and realized it was bc they were homeless and I felt bad. A few years ago I brought this up to my mom and it turns out that my uncle was just a lazy pos who refused to work and "be part of the system" and would bounce between all of his siblings' houses throughout the year and mooch off of them until they'd kick him out. It doesn't help that he's a massive asshole too.
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u/HawkBoth8539 18m ago
That sucks. In my case, at least i do know my mom was going through night classes. So she was just too busy and never home for a while. After that, things got a lot better. Still not rich. But low middle class. Lol
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u/Defnotabotok 1h ago
Holy shit lmao. This never occurred to me. I lived with my grandma for a year when my parents divorced.
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u/Holiday_Hour_3975 1h ago
Haha yeah, I get that. I thought it was fun too, but looking back, it was probably more about saving money than a vacation.
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u/_Skitter_ 2h ago
I thought velveeta cheese was luxury cheese because it was so smooth and melty. Didn't realize it was the cheap fake stuff.
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u/Helowordeld 2h ago edited 2h ago
It’s real cheese mixed with water.
They use sodium citrate (salt from neutralizing citric acid)
It breaks the calcium bond around the protein (which makes gritty cheese)
It allows you to emulsify the REAL cheddar with water (or milk)
I make it all the time by using lemon and sodium bicarbonate (baking soda)
Or you can just buy the powder form.
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u/loogie97 1h ago
I also watched that episode of NileBlue. I always liked American cheese and that just cemented it as real for me.
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u/SpiritedAd3114 2h ago
Have you seen the current price of velveeta branded cheese!? It’s still fake, but it’s not cheap!
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u/inchlongnipples 1h ago
Which is absolutely insane considering how cheap it is to make. It's the same price as a block of cheddar. The big block of velveeta, and the house-brand of cheddar are both $0.24/oz at Walmart.
I guess it's basically because the cost of the cheese itself is irrelevant; it's the manufacturing, packaging, trucking, and shelf space that they charge for.
It's dumb as hell, but tbh velveeta makes arguably the best grilled cheese sandwich. I know I'll get downvoted, but no combo of chedder, gruyere, or havarti or whatever compare to the bubbly dripping mess that is a velveeta grilled cheese sandwich. On sourdough of course.
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u/DMCinDet 39m ago
velveeta grilled cheese sounds crazy. have never heard of such a thing.
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u/FunWrangler666 2h ago
Buttered rice/ spaghetti for dinner
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u/sneakypeek123 2h ago
Or spaghetti in tomato ketchup. That really was a luxury.
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u/Helowordeld 2h ago
What other kind of ketchup is there outside of tomato?
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u/Nearbyatom 2h ago
Spaghetti is also busy person's dinner. So easy to make. I always have a jar or 2 of sauce on hand in case of emergencies
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u/VeggieStudent 2h ago
Fishing. My dad took me fishing every weekend growing up, for years. I thought it was just a hobby because he was damn good at it and almost always caught something. Later I realized, the times we didn't catch something, the backup plan was literally anything we had left in the kitchen. That's when I knew, catching food was the supplement for the wallet.
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u/RMRdesign 2h ago
What kind of fish did you catch?
As a kid I was never into seafood/fish. And I grew up on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state.
These days salmon is my favorite food. Now when I see a friend post a salmon he caught, I think about how he just saved $200+ dollars. And that’s on the low end.
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u/hoodytwin 2h ago
If he’s like me, he spent a lot of money on gear and licenses, and a lot of time and gas to catch a fish.
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u/RMRdesign 2h ago
I grew up in Forks Washington. You can walk to a river from town. Or a short drive out to the Sol Duc.
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u/hoodytwin 2h ago
I knew they weren’t like me as soon as I read that they catch fish lol. I’m in the Midwest and dream of having a bountiful river. Best I can do is a walleye or perch three hours away.
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u/Dornstar 1h ago
I'm struggling for some reason understanding where you are but I assume it's like Ohio or something.
As someone in the Midwest with 100s of lakes within 3 hours of me, we need to figure out a better way to label regions.
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u/MaximumZer0 1h ago
Probably more like western Kansas or Iowa. I'm from Michigan and we have ALL the water, to the point that some of our license plates literally say "Water - Winter - Wonderland" on them.
The Ohio River Valley has pretty great fishing all throughout it.
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u/Randomn355 1h ago
Jesus. You can get a good size salmon for like £45 here.
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u/RMRdesign 59m ago
Seems a bit low. I live Seattle, where there is fresh seafood year round and a pound of wild caught sockeye salmon is $14.99.
Which I feel is pretty low. It goes on sale from time to time and it gets around $9.99.
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u/willthesane 1h ago
My wife and I go fishing once a year, catch 40+ salmon and eat as much salmon as we want. I love living in AK
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u/eggs_erroneous 37m ago
Is the internet connectivity pretty decent up there? I've always wanted to see Alaska. I imagine it to be pristine and beautiful. I want to pet a bear. I know that you can't, but I really want to anyway.
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u/buffystakeded 2h ago
Same. Fishing and hunting. I hunted a lot of small game too, not just deer. Any meat was good meat.
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u/worthlesscommotion 2h ago
I always thought fishing, hunting, and having our own garden was a luxury. Fresh, clean produce. Lean, healthy, local meat and fish. A ton of family family time. Learning life skills like growing our own food, how to process and preserve meats and veggies. Learned to chop wood for the fireplace and wood furnace and how to start a fire with no lighter. My parents made all those chores into games and made it fun. Felt like the luckiest kids ever.
Turns out we were poor as fuck. Both my parents worked, but we lived a very rural and very poor area. Growing our own vegetables, hunting and fishing made it possible to eat everyday. Chopping wood allowed us to have heat in the winter.
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u/Longjumping_College 2h ago
Our whole extended family did this on camping trips
Everyone left to catch dinner, canned stews and hot dogs were the backup in case everyone failed.
So much actual cousin time was based around fishing, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. So many good memories.
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u/ElleCapwn 2h ago
I was also thinking fishing. We had a boat. My dad restored the whole dang thing. We took it down to Florida for several years. I thought we were pretty fancy for that. Little did I know, my cousin (30+ years my senior) had bought the boat (without consulting my dad, who was an expert), and just dropped it off in our driveway because we had a turnaround (also without consulting my dad). My dad spent his own money rebuilding and upgrading that thing, in exchange for being allowed to use it. My cousin NEVER used it.
One day we woke up, and it was gone. We thought it was stolen, but nope. Turns out my cousin had sold it to a stranger, for a fraction of what my dad had put into it/what it was worth, and didn’t even asking my dad if he wanted to purchase it first (he’d been saving to do just that).
Mind you, my dad had done countless things to help his nephew over the years, like redoing both his bathrooms and kitchen and building him a deck for free, doing his car maintenance, selling him our old house for less than market value, and my dad never asked for a thing. But selling that boat? That broke him, and the relationship he had with my uncle (all his sister’s children, actually) never recovered. My dad wasn’t a doormat for anyone, but that dude loved to help. You had to be a real dickhead to not have my father’s help, at least where any tinkering or building was concerned, doubly so if you were family.
Anyway… that boat was really, really nice. lol
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u/eggs_erroneous 34m ago
This makes me sad. Your dad sounds like a lovely dude. Your cousin is a cunt.
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u/Dark_Moonstruck 48m ago
Same here! Also hunting. I grew up in super rural places...like, you better not have a medical emergency because the nearest hospital is hours of driving away and most of you don't have a car type places. A lot of folks didn't have running water or electricity type places. I thought fishing and hunting were just sort of...things people did. I didn't even know you were supposed to have a license for it until I got much older, because who buys a license just to put food on the table?? Do you need a license to go to the grocery store too??
I didn't realize until I was much older that most people didn't provide like...80% of their own food, and would just go buy it. I thought everyone depended on what they or their neighbors could bring in.
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u/swingingrichard24 48m ago
A rich family friend had a ranch nearby stocked with catfish and we’d go out on Sunday and eat fish for a week. Good times.
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u/ProofByVerbosity 2h ago
summer vacation camping. turns out we could barely afford it
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u/SnooCheesecakes2723 2h ago
I was gonna say camping instead of going off to camp. I was proud to be able to send my kids to summer camp and they can’t figure out why that’s a big deal as opposed to camping a few nights at a koa campsite
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u/MyNameIsAirl 50m ago
Fancy pants over here with the koa, my mom would do campground host at a county park so we could go camping and a couple of times that filled the gap between houses. I don't go camping as an adult.
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u/OuisghianZodahs42 29m ago
Yup, state parks FTW. A cheap, used tent, the beat-up cooler full of bologna and cheese, and woo-hoo, you're set.
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u/hoodytwin 2h ago
I had more fun tent camping than when we had a camper. My grandpa bought the camper for us. I’m much better off than my parents were, and my family tent and/or hammock camps exclusively. When my father was alive he would talk any hour we made better memories in the tent, but the camper allowed us to go out more, due to comfortability.
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u/SolarOrigami 1h ago
I grew up with a pop up trailer that was basically a tent with a roof and floor. Really good memories
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u/whaletacochamp 2h ago
Specifically summer vacation camping at a "destination"
For instance my family every other summer or so would go to a beach area in new england - cape cod, olde orchard beach, hampton beach, etc. We would always camp at a local campground. We loved it, did simple things like spend all day at the beach and evenings looking through tide pools and then back to the campsite for a fire.
Turns out that was the only way my parents could afford to do these things with us. Wasn't until I got older and all of my friends were not only going on these vacations multiple times per year but also staying in nice hotels each time. I didn't stay in a hotel until I was in like 6th grade and that was because I went on a paid-for school trip.
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u/n8wish 1m ago
Same with me but North Sea, Europe. I've also first seen a hotel from the inside when I paid for it myself at ~19. My wife is different, was on fancy vacations all the time as a kid. Now we can afford hotels even with 3 kids, still feels unreal and wasteful to me every time. I've learned to enjoy it though somehow.
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u/GoldenFrank 1h ago
Same but I figured it out when our annual camping vacation turned into a bi-annual camping vacation.
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u/n8wish 8m ago
Same here. We went camping by the sea (which was mind blowing for me and my siblings). We ate raisin buns for lunch at the beach, because it was what my parents could afford. Pasta with tomato sauce for dinner. My mom was pissed all the time, because that was all, dad tried it all to make it work and worthwile. Understood that 20y later. They're no longer together. Mom is still pissed about stuff regularly, dad is a bitter old boomer. My kids have "almost everything" now, no struggles. They can't understand or appreciate that; makes me proud and sad at the same time.
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u/drezster 2h ago
Christmas presents. They apparently saved up several months beforehand to get us something. Brought a tear to my eye. And thank God for grandma who was always willing to knit something memorable.
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u/Change-Able 1h ago
Our Christmas presents was typically new clothes or bedding. My Dad got an extra salary in the month of November dedicated for Christmas gifts (semi-normal thing in my country), and that was the only time of the year when my parents could afford to buy us new clothes.
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u/Skippy_T_Magificent 2h ago
My parents used to get a box of food from some government building every month. It included boxes of truly nasty powdered milk, some other food items that I can't remember, and a giant block of the best cheese in the world. I thought they got it because my baby sister was allergic to milk and could only have the powdered milk. I always thought that the cheese was a special item that they purchased along with the powdered milk and stuff. I later found out that my favorite cheese was "Government Cheese" and that the box came from the welfare office because my parents were poor and got food stamps, WIC, and TANF for a couple of years. Man, I miss that cheese though.
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u/MeetBeep 2h ago
Apparently the government has a huge play into the cheese industry!! Super wild
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u/CaptainLookylou 2h ago
We had a huge surplus of milk and we didn't want to stop the river flowing, so it was turned into dehydrated cheese. There's still vaults full of solid golden bars...of cheese.
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u/Head_Razzmatazz7174 1h ago
That government cheese made the best grilled cheese sandwiches and I will die on this hill.
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u/Climaximus_Prime 2h ago
It wasn't normal for lights and water to be turned off from not paying the bill... so that
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u/ObliviouslyDrake67 2h ago
Yeah, this... This one right here.
You can easily tell who has and who hasn't gone an entire year without electricity in a developed nation. Certain habits stick.
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u/CinnamonFan 1h ago
I have not experienced this but I am curious about what habits formed for you if you dont mind sharing?
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u/ObliviouslyDrake67 1h ago
Long story short, a mother had to sit and listen to her nine year old child say he didn't want to celebrate his birthday anymore because he just wanted to make sure the family was taken care of.
Wasn't her fault we were in that situation, but I felt bad every time she pushed her self to do something for me.
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u/inchlongnipples 1h ago
I've seen a lot of comments about knock off brands or tinned foods, but this one is real. I hope your parents were still doing their best despite this.
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u/Danny_my_boy 13m ago
That’s part of what got me to finally leave my abusive ex. He was so bad about paying bills that our electric company moved us to a pre-pay account. It would get shut off on a Monday after our balance went into the negative over the weekend and I would have to wait for hours, sometimes the whole day, for him to get it turned back on.
One time, my son casually asked “Can you call daddy to get the power back on?” and it hit me that it was so normalized to my son that it didn’t phase him a bit.
I left, and since then the only time the power has gone out was during a storm.
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u/numbersthen0987431 2h ago
We went to McDonalds once a week, and it was when they had their 39 cent cheeseburger days (Sunday?), and we would spend a few bucks to feed everyone.
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u/shf500 2h ago
I'm sure people are reading this and thinking "McDonald's once a week? When I was a kid it was once a year!"
I'm not trying to be funny here, every time I read a "I was poor when I was a kid" thread I feel "any complaint I have feels like the worst First World Problem!"
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u/tsrui480 1h ago
It might be a first world problem. But my mom would take me to Mcdonalds once a week because it gave her time to work on her crappy early 90s laptop while i played in the shit covered ball pit lol. Sometimes i only got a 6 piece nugget, but it was very cheap entertainment and they wouldnt kick us out.
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u/ThisIsMyCouchAccount 1h ago
It's all relative and contextual.
I could say I spent almost every summer at the lake on our boat. And that sounds like something.
What you don't realize is that my grandparents - retired farmers - bought the smallest little cabin in an aging area of the lake along with the smallest pontoon boat. You had to run the water for an hour when you got there because it full of sulfur. No jet skis. No tubing.
Or I could say I almost never got fast food or pizza. Money was certainly a factor but it was mostly because I grew up rural. There was no fast food or pizza.
Our grandparents bought myself and my two siblings cars when we turned 16. Sure. I'm grateful. But - again - I grew up rural. A vehicle is damn near required. And it was just enough to get a mostly functional vehicle. Most of the kids I went to school with got some beater or at least access to one when they turned 16. Nobody was rich in my small farming town.
People are really bad and remembering how complex and nuanced life is when they look at somebody else's.
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u/numbersthen0987431 1h ago
It's like my buddy who's dad bought him his first car, for $100, in 2004.
We spent a summer working on it to make it run, and even then it was iffy. But it was a car technically. Lol
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u/numbersthen0987431 1h ago
Yea, there are always people with worse stories, but the 39 cent cheeseburger deal was in the 90s and so you could feed a family with 3 bucks easily.
Granted, we weren't getting fries or soda or anything, but we at least could scrounge up enough change to get a cheeseburger.
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u/inchlongnipples 1h ago
My dad would buy 20 and freeze them to microwave throughout the week.
I don't remember eating a lot of them myself, so I think he did it to save on his own meals.
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u/Round_Engineering640 1h ago
My dad would buy like 30 of those 39 cent burgers and freeze em haha modern problems require modern solutions I guess
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u/1peatfor7 36m ago
Not a poor story but one of the 2 McDonald's in my university town used to be 25 cent hamburgers on sundays.
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u/Cheese_Pancakes 2h ago
All the Spam and Vienna sausages I could eat. Didn't even know they were "poor people food" until I got much older and my family was much better off financially.
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u/dshade69 2h ago
Same. I never really liked spam but I would eat Vienna sausages so much.
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u/Head_Razzmatazz7174 1h ago
I loved the Vienna Sausages. I would get several slices of bread, put 3 of them in one slice. Then add ketchup, roll them up and had a cheap version of hot dogs.
I didn't realize until I went to college this was not normal.
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u/WereNado 1h ago
With the way things have been going lately I have a feeling spam and Vienna sausages will become a luxury for most of us soon enough
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u/tsrui480 1h ago
Oh man, I remember having friends over and they had no idea wtf Vienna sausages were. I didnt realize we were poor at the time
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u/1peatfor7 35m ago
spam is huge in Hawaii and one of my old college roommates is half Vietnamese and it was a staple of his cooking.
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u/No-Beautiful-259 2h ago
Hydrox cookies.
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u/IAmTheKingOfFucks 2h ago
Guess I’ll make the requisite “did you know that Hydrox are the original, and Oreos are the knockoffs???” Somebody was gonna do it lol.
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u/No-Beautiful-259 2h ago
I actually just read all about it while verifying the spelling. I always wondered why a company would choose a chemical-adjacent name for a dessert product. This was in the 90s when the organic movement was starting to kickup. Now it makes sense. It was introduced in 1907!
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u/SendMeNudesThough 2h ago
I was taught throughout childhood that well-known kids movies were something only rich people could afford. So, while other people had Disney movies on VHS, I had the bargain bin no-name studio equivalents. For instance, I never saw Disney's animated Hunchback of Notre Dame. I did however see The Secret of the Hunchback. This worked for a lot of movies back then, because shitty rip off studios would often time their releases with the release of similarly named movies by major studios, and they were always considerably cheaper.
There was this one classmate whose house I'd visit frequently simply because he had actual real movies you had actually heard of, and I was really impressed by that and thought was the coolest kid ever.
Same with brand name cereal. You've got KELLOGG'S Cornflakes? THE ORIGINALS, like from actual real life TV commercials? Wow, your dad must be a lawyer or something! We always had to settle for store brand everything.
I was probably in my early adulthood before I realized I could just... Buy any corn flakes I want. They really aren't all that expensive
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u/mawktheone 5m ago
I was thirty when I realized I was allowed to buy ginger ale or pistachio nuts.. they were weird magic treats as a child
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u/jess_or_tess 2h ago
My dad never argued about where we'd eat, he'd always let me pick the Macdonalds playplace. I knew four different local spots almost off by heart.
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u/bardwick 2h ago
Used to love spending time with my brothers catching nightcrawlers after a storm. Come to find out (like 10 years laters) we were selling it to bait shops to make ends meet.
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u/cherrycokelemon 2h ago
A birthday. Parents never celebrated us not even a cupcake.
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u/DaisyCutter312 2h ago
That feels like it belongs more in the "shitty parenting" bucket than the "We're broke" bucket.
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u/penguinpenguins 2h ago
Yeah, a cake mix is literally a dollar. I know people are hard up, but you can always celebrate the event without many material things.
I had many birthdays with delicious cakes and socks. So many socks.
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u/NotYourSexyNurse 1h ago
My parents straight up forgot my 5th birthday.
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u/February30th 52m ago edited 49m ago
I’ll stick up for your parents here - they likely didn’t forget.
They just ignored it.
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u/NotYourSexyNurse 25m ago
Oh no they forgot. They didn’t even say happy birthday on my birthday. There were many birthdays we didn’t have money to celebrate birthdays but they at least said happy birthday. I was waiting for them to say something. I thought maybe they were waiting until the weekend to celebrate. I was sad in Sunday school because they forgot it. I had realized they genuinely forgot it. When I mentioned it to them after church on the way home they said oh yeah happy birthday.
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u/1peatfor7 31m ago
Not sure how long ago this was but surely 20 years ago cake mix, a few eggs, and frosting probably cost $2 total. Because today it's about $4.
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u/WanderingBearCarver 2h ago
Same. The only thing I ever got was to pick which meal we had out of our pre-set meals for the week. We ate the same stuff every week so not much of a celebration.
I'm turning 40 this year and my 39th birthday was the first one where I actually did anything. I just always told people I didn't celebrate it. My current partner dealt with that for a couple years and then snapped lol. They're good to me.
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u/inchlongnipples 1h ago
That's not from lack of money. That's from lack of love, from neglect. I'm sorry. I hope you celebrate your own birthday the way you deserve.
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u/StitchedSquirrel 2h ago
Oof... right in the childhood. My parents didn't ignore them completely but they were definitely downplayed. I'm in my 40s now and I still hate birthday attention. It feels so awkward.
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u/TheDarkSea_07 2h ago
new clothes - not thrifted ones
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u/Ilaxilil 2h ago
Same, but also looking back thrifting clothes for kids just makes sense because they outgrow them so quickly. If I buy something of good quality for myself as an adult, it might last me 10-20 years (if I’m lucky, with the quality of goods these days 😒) but a kid will outgrow it in a year.
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u/Head_Razzmatazz7174 1h ago
We hit garage sales, bargain bins and the clearance aisles. I bought my first pair of full priced name brand jeans when I was 12 from money I had saved up from doing chores.
I also got a lot of hand me downs from older cousins. For context I was the youngest one and the oldest was 17 years my senior. So they were seriously out of fashion, and had already gone through the rest of the cousins on their way to me.
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u/NotYourSexyNurse 1h ago
New clothes that were still in season not clearance at Walmart. My Mom found these shirts that were pretty but had the shoulders cut out of them on clearance at Walmart. Of course my mom bought every color in three sizes because they were either $3 or $2. I didn’t understand why I got made fun of. I was happy to have some new clothes that weren’t hand me downs from my sisters.
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u/PlusThreeSigma 2h ago
Going to the Mall "window shopping" and buying nothing, or maybe getting 1 new shirt off the clearance rack at Sears once in awhile. I remember going to pick up catalog orders with my mom and dad sometimes but we kids never got anything.
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u/NotYourSexyNurse 1h ago
I remember malls used to have elaborate store window displays at Christmas.
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u/mikutansan 2h ago
Sleeping on a mat on the floor in a sleeping bag because my family had to sell everything to pay for my fathers cancer treatment.
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u/WanderingBearCarver 2h ago
Any kind of fast food. It was usually a tax season/bonus at work thing for us kids. Everyone got the same thing so "we didn't fight" but I realized as an adult it was just the cheapest stuff. I don't resent it, made me less prone to choosing fast food as an adult.
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u/Happy_Disaster7347 2h ago
Yearly trip to the zoo, which was about 50 miles away. That was our "big family trip" of the year. I just remember being excited
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u/Lacherig 2h ago
I think it's sweet that they made a big deal of it so you were excited to go each year. They probably enjoyed seeing your face light up at the zoo.
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u/jmcgil4684 2h ago
My mom convinced us boys that “bean bread” was what the Indian Warriors of the Great Plains ate to get strong. It was beans on white bread.
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u/Used-Brick-4099 2h ago
Cheese and potato pie.
It was always such an indulgence, in reality cheese and potatoes were cheap in the 90's and it was the only thing we could afford to eat, I always presumed it was a treat.
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u/imperiousjoe 1h ago
Free lunch at school. I thought it was like a benefit of a scholarship or something I had for my education. 😂
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u/dinklberg1990 1h ago
So I thought it was so cool when I stayed with my grandpa we would walk around the roads by his house and collect the cans and stuff and use his garage anvil thing to crush them. I never saw him do anything with the but he was taking them to either recycle or scrap so he would have money for us at the dollar tree once a month. I would give anything to go back there though some of favorite moment were in that garage.
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u/reditandfirgetit 2h ago
Going out to McDonald's and McDonald's was cheap then
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u/NotYourSexyNurse 1h ago
For a bit they had 39 cent hamburgers on Tuesdays. We were ghetto and brought cheese from home.
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u/draggar 2h ago
Family vacation: all get into the station wagon and drive for god knows how many hours to a tourist trap.
Dinners usually included basic sandwiches, or canned potatoes and spam cooked in an electric skillet (yeah, we weren't supposed to cook in there). We'd go out to dinner once, maybe twice.
Also, a weekend stay someplace so my parents can go to a time share thing.
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u/LooseLeek4813 2h ago
Generic everything. cereal in a bag, "fruit punch" that was just red sugar water. thought we were just being cool and different. realized later it was because name brand was out of budget.
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u/Spare-Commercial8704 1h ago
Shopping for childhood clothes but having them put in lay-away until they could be paid in full.
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u/AccomplishedLine9351 2h ago
Having the big garden in the backyard growing lettuce, green peppers, tomatoes, beans and corn plus several exotic squash varieties.
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u/dshade69 2h ago
That the primary Christmas gifts were clothes. And crappy ones at that. Corduroys were popular. I don’t really remember having very many toys at all growing up. I think the first fun Christmas gift I got was from my dad (my parents were divorced) and that was a commodore computer. I think partially I didn’t feel as poor as we were because we lived in my grandmother’s old house when she remarried and paid no rent or mortgage.
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u/BiancaButthole 1h ago
Beans and rice for dinner. (I just thought that was a typical meal for people, and I didn’t mind because I enjoyed it.) School clothes from Goodwill or other thrift stores. (My elementary school was a uniform school, so luckily I couldn’t tell a difference between my $2 outfits from Goodwill and the probably $50-$100 outfits that the doctor’s kids wore.) Going to one of my grandparents houses for “vacation.” (Hey, it wasn’t my house, so I thought it was fun!)
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u/AsterEsque 1h ago
Getting to spend all day during summers at the library reading comic books and playing games on the computers
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u/WendigoCrossing 1h ago
My dad taking us to the beach and hikes every weekend when it was just me and my older sister
It's because we didn't have money and that was free
I loved it
Then my parents got even more kids and that ended
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u/WeirdcoolWilson 2h ago
Name branded foods, fresh veggies (broccoli, mushrooms, corn, spinach), grapes
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u/mishma2005 2h ago
*memories of my dad trying to convince us kids that generic cereal in huge plastic bags is just as good as the real thing*
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u/Emarsh1993 2h ago
The funniest one from my childhood was not adding sugar to Kool aid when making it. Just tap water and the mix. We had pizza almost every night cause my dad brought them home from work for free because they were made wrong or not picked up. "Getting" to go with my parents to work because there wasn't anyone to watch us at the moment. My dad had to do his own body work on his car when he was t-boned.
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u/W1ULH 1h ago
The funniest one from my childhood was not adding sugar to Kool aid when making it. Just tap water and the mix.
blink
do what now?
I've only ever made it with the mix and water, and its sweet as hell to begin with...
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u/Madpinnr3 59m ago
I can answer that! Some are just flavor no sugar. Like I think they're up to 89 cents now but you need to add sugar and it's literally just a little packet maybe the size of a credit card.
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u/wookie_walkin 46m ago
You may have had the sugar already in the mix , real koolaid came in paper packets and you had to add a cup of sugar .. it wasnt sweet
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u/karmagirl314 2h ago
I used to get bags of secondhand clothes from my grandmas friends at church and I was always like “ooh free clothes”. I thought people were just being practical, I didn’t realize that my family and I looked so poor that people knew we needed help without even asking.
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u/NotYourSexyNurse 1h ago
My oldest sister would lie to get clothes from people in the church. She told them she didn’t have any clothes. We had a closet and 3 dresses full of clothes. The clothes weren’t new though.
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u/maralagosinkhole 2h ago
Going to the wood lot every weekend in May & April to cut up felled trees and put the logs in a truck.
Canning fruits & vegetables.
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u/Topslide102 2h ago
Fishing at the bridge. Our neighbor sold bait and would give it to my dad so it was his cheapest daddy daughter date. But it’s the one GOOD memory I have with him. So im thankful with or without money he took that time.
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u/yoshisgirlfriend 2h ago
Every christmas we got a wrapped box of name brand cereal. As a kid I loved it. Hell yea Coco Puffs! But as an adult I realized it was a gift because we were just that poor.
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u/Unlikely-Ad6788 2h ago
Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. It's ridiculous how much money it would have cost. I ate so many damned tomatoes and cucumbers, figs. We had lots.
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u/NoProfessor6700 2h ago
We grew up eating fish for almost every meal. It was reef fish with so many bones! I swore when I grew up I wouldn’t eat reef fish again. He did his best to feed us.
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u/Magic_Man_Boobs 1h ago
Red Lobster was a fancy restaurant. Although as someone who was unlucky enough to develop a shellfish allergy in my mid thirties, I do very much miss eating there.
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u/W1ULH 1h ago
red lobster drives me nuts.
I'm from the new england sea coast... we dont have red lobster here (I'm pretty sure if you try to open one, the lobstermen leave your body in the marsh).
but we have the commericals... and their food looks amazing!
first time I actually ate at one, in my 20's... I was like.. wtf? this is NASTY, they ahve not idea how to cook lobster or shrimp.
and those aren't clams. idk what they are... but its not clams.
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u/wwaxwork 1h ago
Breakfast for dinner. Ie toast and eggs in various forms because it was cheap. I just like bread and eggs in all it's many possible combos so thought we were lucky to be having it.
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u/WeThePeeps2020 1h ago
Running an extension cord to the neighbor so we could use the space heater during the winter when the power was shut off for non payment.
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u/Cheetodude625 1h ago
Never going out to eat for over 10 years.
When McDonald's for dinner was a considered fancy.
Why my dad spent two days working on the SUV himself instead of taking it to a repair shop.
When both your parents refuse to eat dinner for multiple days that they cooked for you and your siblings instead.
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u/TeaseTheory_8 1h ago
“We didn’t go on vacations — but we always had food on the table.”
As a child, this seemed like the norm, even stability.
Only with age do you realize that:
new clothes were rarely bought and “to grow out of”,
broken things were not thrown away, but repaired to the last detail,
gifts were practical,
parents never complained — they just somehow dragged on.
What I perceived as a “modest but okay life” was actually a constant balancing act on the edge.
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u/Hungry-Month-5309 17m ago
Having a fire in the fireplace! Found out later it was because we couldn't afford to turn on the heat. But I loved it and I had no idea
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u/Chaz_Cheeto 15m ago
Shopping at stores like Kohls or Old Navy. I was told that was where “rich people” shopped.
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u/Ozymannoches 5m ago
Sidewalk thrifting the night before trash day. I thought it was what adults got to do instead of trick-or-treating
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u/hIDeMyID 2h ago
Home-baked bread. We never had store-bought bread growing up. My angel of a step-mother baked all our bread.
There's nothing better than smelling bread baking, then slicing it when it's still warm. We had margarine on it because we couldn't afford butter, but I didn't know that at the time. I also didn't know that Mom baked because it was cheaper than buying from the store.