What was a HUGE deal in your house growing up that is normal for you now?

[Bakingmamma]

Various things in my house.

A big one was baking. Although we
usually had the things in the house, wanting to bake was such a big deal and we could only do it on special occasions. Possibly did it once or twice a year.

I’m not talking about big extravagant bakes either! I’m talking about 12 bog standard cupcakes with some basic icing on!

It was only when I reached adulthood that I realized I could cook some basic cupcakes in 20 minutes and it wasn’t a big deal at all.

It takes longer to do a load of washing!

What was a huge deal in your house that you’ve now normalized for your own children? I can’t be the only one 🙈

Getting a takeaway. Where we lived growing up, you couldn't get a takeaway delivered so we would occasionally get a fish and chips and bring them home. Probably less than once a year.
We now live where you can get takeaway delivered and we can walk to 3 or 4 different takeaways within about 5 mins. We probably have takeaway once a month now, sometimes it's weekly!

Fizzy drinks saved for christmas and Sundays and restricted to one glass.

Winter coat to be worn on Sunday to church (long wool and I'd love one now)

I've never spent a day in PJs so I'm amazed to read that people do :D

We were allowed to watch TV eating Sunday tea (at the table). Strong memories of Black beauty and Ski Sunday or show jumping with cheese on toast

Every meal was at the table which was 'laid' properly beforehand

Takeaways - if we got one it was a real treat. These days people have them almost every night!

Going to the cinema was a special occasion. It used to be so exciting, getting pick n mix and watching a film with an intermission.

Bath night was once a week on a Sunday, now I have them nearly every day.

Fizzy pop - rarely every got it except for special occasions.

I remember getting a bottle of corona fizz from the milkman once a week , when it was gone, it was gone . Another memory is Black Forest gateau, being the ultimate in sophistication .

Takeaways , don't think I ever had one until I lived alone

My dad is British and my mum Canadian but we lived in the UK. We were pretty poor growing up. Not super poor but I do remember Canada being spoken of as some sort of ultra luxurious Sodom and Gomora by my dad. He'd speak of my mums relatives running their cars to warm them up or leaving the heating on when they went out as if they were extravagant millionaires (they probably needed to do this as Canada gets so cold).

There were a lot of comments like "well they have everything over there. They don't know what it's like for us" if my mum commented on a Canadian relative having something extravagant like a tumble dryer. When my mum didn't enforce my grans super strict table manners it was "well anything goes over there (I.e. Canada)". My poor mum.

I definitely remember being at a friends when they ordered a Chinese when I was about 15 and not having a clue what to say I wanted as I'd never had one. I think I said sweet and sour chicken as I'd seen it on a tv show.

Butter was a huge treat, maybe once every few months.

Mars bars, we used to have one and my mom would cut it into four so we had a small piece each. This was only once a week.

Bath and hair wash on a Sunday

No tv during the week, we had to be playing outside or in our bedrooms.

No phones or internet. I was born in the early 80s, so both things existed and available by the time I was a preteen but my parents just couldn’t afford it.

Like others, no takeaways, no restaurants, no international food, all my meals were straight from freezer to the oven, it was all breaded and beige.

@DahliaMacNamara we only went to my mums parents too. But only with mum who was a teacher as my dad worked at a factory where they had fixed holidays where the factory shut down (2 weeks in the summer, week at Christmas is what I remember) and the summer one was before the country school holidays started. Dad could never just have a day off to have a long weekend until I was 11ish when he had moved into a role that was needed during shutdown so there was more flexibility to an extent.
In the 70's/ early 80's I certainly didn't feel totally weird for not going on a big holiday though

Loving this thread, particularly the lovely warm memories. My folks made a big deal of just about everything to do with money (which translated to hundreds of micro-rules to do with every aspect of family life ultimately). Travel, heat, laundry, food, entertainment, all closely monitored. They were over-protective too, so getting consent to go anywhere was tricky. Sometimes I think we spoil our kids by letting them pick the fruit they want at the supermarket, or go out whenever they ask, then I remember my own childhood and think oh hell no…

Central heating, we didn't have it but also never had any form of heating on 🥶

Having a bath

Baking was pretty much banned and even pissed my mum off when I was a teenager and baked alone with friends at my house for some reason

Eating out

Driving more than 20 mins. My dad acted like we were driving from London to Edinburgh and when I passed my driving test I went passed the 'family road boundary' and remember thinking wtf why have we never gone past our towns boundaries. I have driven all over the U.K. since and it still annoys me how small minded my family were!

-Eating out - The Berni Inn then later, The Harvester (early birds for both, naturally)
-Having a mcDonalds
-Being allowed a Cornetto (they were 50p and normally we were only allowed 25p max)
-Being allowed a whole cola at a mcDonalds/Berni Inn (as opposed to having to share one)
-Having visitors over
-Shop bought clothes rather than homemade (and unfashionable) ones

Needless to say as a result we don’t ever go to a harvester, my mind is blown at the fact you can still buy 4 Cornettos for £2, and I’m obsessed with buying ‘the right’ clothes for DD…

We couldn't go to a party or a friend's house, as 'we would have to invite them back here'. We rarely had visitors, only family and even then my parents tried to get out of socialising.

Everything that happened was a big deal, not just in my family but in other households too. Most of the women were SAHM and didn't seem to go They all got married young so would be in their 30s stressing about having to do anything extra.anywhere or do anything outside of home. I think looking back they got out of a lot of eg taking dcs places, hosting playdates.

We couldn't give an acquaintance a lift but we couldn't be seen to refuse. This led to interesting results with my mother driving to work the long way round, making excuses when asked. I think she resented working fulltime when most women didn't, paying to keep a car on the road and giving lifts to people with plenty of free time.

staying in a hotel. My mum once said to me- ‘people like us don’t stay in hotels’ as she booked us another b and b for our summer seaside holiday. If we passed a hotel with a big glass entrance I would always try to look at the people inside, or going in and out to see if they somehow seemed rich / fancy.
Since then, I have stayed in all kinds of hotels from budget ones to fairly expensive ones as a treat, I still feel
like an imposter when I check in, as if I am expecting a member of staff to tell me to leave because we don’t belong there because it was drummed into me as a child that we didn’t belong in those places. See also cruise ships, holidays abroad, first class train carriages and any decent restaurant (other than fast food / pub / carvery / chinese buffet / chain type places)- anything above that was ‘not for the likes of us’. She would have been horrified at the idea of going for afternoon tea in a nice hotel or at somewhere like Betty’s Tea Rooms where people might deem us not fit to be there, afternoon tea for us was a cup of tea and a scone at a local cafe or bakery with a seating area. My parents (mum especially) had a strange notion of being firmly working class and ‘knowing their place’, and not ‘having notions above your station’. I saw my mum intimidated more than once by extended family members who were clearly better off than us, she was uncomfortable anywhere that she felt was ‘posh’ and hated to ‘inconvenience’ hospitality staff.
I have to work hard to fix/ignore my insecurities about these sort of situations, and not pass them on to my children, which isn’t easy when it was a running theme of my childhood.

Buying furniture! Not that such things should be impulse purchases, but I think it must have been comparatively more expensive then. I remember it was a huge deal when the dining room chairs were reupholstered and we spent (what felt like!) hours in the showroom for my mum to choose fabric. Same in the pine furniture store choosing a new wardrobe, then having to wait for it to be delivered. Both still stick out in my memory and I must have been under ten at the time.

I kind of do think that never or hardly ever having these things - hotel stays, instant hot water, eating out, foreign holidays, exotic foods etc - has made my adult life a whole lot more exciting. I'm in my 50s and I still feel excited and thrilled about staying in a hotel, going abroad, even the fact that I can go and buy myself a cream cake if I like, as we just never did and I thought of them as out of bounds.

I know all generations think that kids today don't know they're born - and of course I know many kids still don't have much and live in poverty - but kids who grow up now having lots of all this stuff, and then face a less salubrious life as adults with high rents and house prices etc won't have that.

Central heating - we only had a wood burning stove in the living room and standalone electric heaters in bedrooms that were only allowed to be on for an hour in the evening before bed.

TV on before 6pm and indeed eating front of TV - an unimagined horror when I was growing up.

Shower - we had a bath only and hair was washed using a plastic jug.

Music at home- oddly my parents were fond of music, particularly folk music and we had a record player (and we kids had our own CD players and radios in our rooms) but my parents only listened to radio 4 around the house - never music radio.

this is a sad thread
and surprising.
it is still a big deal if we go out for a meal, still economising!

lifts, it wasnt a huge deal, just wasnt really part of my growing up,
i made my own way to where i wanted to go and back.

after school clubs
evening sports etc.,
they didnt happen or at least i was unaware of them,
no room at brownie club for me,
my own dc did a lot, swim lessons, dance, football, scouts, gymnastics. drama,
nothing for me, i do remember a dance class but i was told if i didnt go the one time i didnt want to, i never would be able to go, no great loss for me as far as i can remember,

This has been a really interesting thread to read and has brought back lots of memories.

I was born in the late 70s, so my memories are from the 80s/ early 90s. I grew up in a northern town, and we were working class.

The things that were special at home were:

• Showers - we had a hose attachment on the bath taps and my parents didn’t get a shower until mid-90s
• Phone calls before 6pm due to the cost. We didn’t even get a phone until the late 80s due to the cost of installing the line.
• Having the heating on for more than an hour in the morning and evening (we didn’t get central heating until the late 80s, after I’d started secondary school).
• Laundry - we had a twin tub until I was about 10, so it was a full days job. When we got a tumble drier, it was hardly ever used due to the cost of electricity
• Fruit that wasn’t apples or pears, with the occasional banana. My grandmother always had grapes, which were such a treat when we visited.
• Roast dinners - mum only did a roast at Xmas or Easter.
• Puddings - only some weekends, and often home-made like rice pudding.
• Fizzy drinks - only at Xmas. We had squash but it had to be made quite weak to make the bottle last.
• Special food at Xmas - chocolate biscuits, mince pies, mixed nuts and raisins, a selection box. My mum used to get those Xmas hampers (where you pay towards it each week), and seeing what treats were in the hamper when it was delivered was a big deal. Wine and sherry were Xmas treats.
• Eating out - very rare, and usually a pub lunch. Takeaways were rare too, and always fish & chips (my dad didn’t like foreign food).
• Garlic, pasta, pizza, curry - all discovered when I went to university.
• School uniform shopping was a major source of stress, especially when all of us were at secondary school. You had to buy early before sizes sold out, but getting enough money was hard. No cheap supermarket clothes then!
• Holidays abroad - we went to Devon or Cornwall, but I didn’t go abroad until I was 17.
• Days out - not really a thing. Sometimes we’d go for a drive and stop off at a pub for a drink before going home. This was a treat as I could have a lemonade.

However, I didn’t feel particularly poor as most of the people we knew were very similar to us - similar jobs, houses, and lifestyles. Sometimes I feel my DD doesn’t know how lucky she is - days out, a holiday abroad, new clothes without any stress (though I still buy secondhand if I see something nice), meals out. But it’s all normal to her!

I do restrict fancy Xmas food, including biscuits, to December, and rarely use my tumble drier due to the cost!

Eating out. Only happened on holiday. I did eat out w friends though as a teen

Having ‘bought’ cakes. My mum made everything from scratch.

going abroad - I didn’t go until I was 13 (with school)?

Oh gosh yes, my poor mum made delicious things all from scratch - cakes, biscuits, yoghurt, bread, pizza - pretty much all meals and we ungrateful tykes were obsessed with shop bought convenience foods as we saw them as something better off people had.

Not being allowed to call boys on the phone. This was as a teen in the late 60s/early '70s USA Girls who called boys were 'chasing them' and it made them look 'fast'. I wasn't even allowed to call my fiancé when I was 19 years old. Of course, he turned out to be an abusive shit, so maybe my parents were right with that one.

Also not being allowed to go over to a bf's house unless our families knew each other. 'Taking a girl to meet the parents' was considered 'too serious' and one step away from an engagement. But if your families knew each other, it was apparently no big deal. Go figure.

Lie ins, we had to be up and washed and dressed before 7.30am even at weekends and holidays because dm wanted the curtains and windows opened, beds made and the vacuuming done. She thought it shameful if curtains weren't open as soon as it got light.
Food shop was a bit of a palaver, meat was delivered by the butcher, bread in the week from the bread van, df took all four of us kids into Sheffield on a Saturday morning to the fish market, to the market to get fruit and veg, bakery to get bread whilst dm did more cleaning.

Eating out. I grew up in the late 60s/early 70s,so going out for a meal, even just a hamburger,was a very rare event. Even when we went on holiday (always in the UK,never abroad) it was always self-catering. I think it was down to my Ddad really. He was of the opinion,why spend money on food eating out when you can have perfectly good food,and much cheaper,at home? I think my Dmum and Ddad went out once a year,for their wedding anniversary,for a meal,at the local Berni Inn (showing my age here!). Nowadays,I think nothing of eating out once or twice a week.

Anyone who had an ensuite... only Joan Collins and Frank Sinatra had one in my mums eyes ( it was the 70's/80's and we were poor). When I bought and moved into my 3rd hse in the early naughties i finally had an ensuite and a downstairs loo and my mum told all her friends. When I moved again in the mid naughties I had a downstairs loo and 2 en-suites, she could not believe it. I moved again in 2011 and had a downstairs loo , 3 ensuite rooms and a family bathroom, 5 toilets! When i showed her to her very own ensuite room.... she told me that her friends son had electric gates and has done very well for himself! 🤷🏻‍♀️

We had a Victorian terrace with an extension for a bathroom we improved it in 70s still downstairs with a separate toilet bathroom.