To ask for your weird family behaviours that you didn't realise weren't normal until you were older?

[Coffeebiscuitsrepeat]

1. We called a toe poking through a sock hole a "potato".

1. Whoever made the most mess at the dinner table "won the prize"... And the prize was to clean up the mess!

When being served yet another pudding of stewed fruit my mother would offer a treat of the TOM ( top of milk) - kind of plug of cream that sat at the top of the whole milk from a bottle.......just yuk

Lancashire crumbly with Christmas fruit cake? Or even just with fruit cake?

Set menus here too!

We had a travelling man in his 60's turn up in our local village when I was about 3...my parents offered him help one stormy night & he ended up staying for 20 years 😂 He would have a bath once a week in our house & Sunday lunch. He was brilliant & would tell me stories about grizzly murders when I was about 10. Seems quite odd now!

We have set places at the dining table now and our own colour plates.
I had strawberries today and put sugar on them much to DHs horror.
My mum used to put cinnamon rather than ginger on melon

We had two cats Poppy and Millie. My Dad never called Millie by her name and only referred to her as the grey one’. She was brown 🥴

My parents were early advocates of recycling, in the mid 80s. Some things they did were:

• Foil milk bottle tops were washed in the dishwasher, for recycling. Afterwards, we children would have to get them out of the cutlery basket, with our small hands.
• They almost never used new envelopes. Instead, they had these sheets of recycled paper which could be stuck on used envelopes, and folded over the top to seal them; this meant that window envelopes could easily be reused.
• We walked bottles to the bottle bank in a shopping trolley, not by car.
• We delivered leaflets about a service of collecting paper and other things for recycling; my dad used to take us with him to do this. We feared letter boxes with "brushes", or with dogs behind them. Looking through letter boxes was strictly forbidden (so tempting when they're at your eye level).

Not related to recycling, but my dad always wrote using brown ink, from a bottle, which would be siphoned into his pen. I doubt if many other people did this.

Your parents were v advanced for that time wanderings!
My mother was brought up in war and hated waste and 'throwaway' culture. She wasn't mean but certain things struck her as wasteful....
Like buying Christmas cards.
One year she got all the old cards she had been sent in previous years....cut the fronts off and stuck them onto bits of white card...
I mean she was quite artistic so it was done well...but surely the white card and envelopes must have cost nearly as much as cards would have...
Perhaps she was just making a point. She was right anyway...this was back in the mid to late 70s. ..

The hugging and kissing issue is an interesting one. My parents did it when we were quite young, but I think they stopped as soon as they thought we might be embarrassed by it, probably when we were aged seven or so. As a result, I became rather unused to physical affection. But when I was about fifteen, someone from school unexpectedly gave me a really warm hug when saying goodbye. I didn't say anything, but I remember melting inside at how this felt, and from then on I really craved hugs, and insisted on hugging my parents regularly, to their bemusement.

At the age of eleven, I read "The Willow Street Kids", which was a set of true stories about issues such as strangers, bullying; and the last few chapters were about inappropriate touching, secrets, and children being made to kiss bearded old relatives when they didn't want to. It was a whole set of issues I had never thought about at all. Although it didn't describe the worst things that could happen to children in this way, I remember wondering "why is this book making such a big deal about touching?".

Beef was always extremely well done, any blood or pink meant you'd be ill if you ate it.

Always kept the original boxes for everything in case it had to be returned. I think firms used to refuse to take bigger items not in the original packaging.

Always turn all switches off apart from fridge and freezer. I still have a habit of checking switches before I go to bed.

My parents always kept the original packaging too. It's something I struggle with, I know we don't need to, but old habits die hard & I quite often keep it!

Yes yes to main presents after Christmas lunch. Agonising. We would go to church in the morning and hear what friends had got for their BIG presents but we couldn't join in. We would however get our little stocking type presents on Christmas Eve evening so we had something to occupy us on Christmas morning (hence not waking parents at ungodly hour for them I realise now) and this would be books, sweets, bubble bath, socks etc.

No opinions allowed either or arguing or heaven forbid fighting. Clamped down on immediately hence we would be at boiling point with no release and so we never confided in parents about anything eg bullying at school or boys/ girls we liked. So glad to have ended that cycle as have great relationship with DC now and it's so important to be open and honest. Also parents never apologised, oh no, they were always right and we were always wrong. End of story.

Rick yes to an intercom too. My sister had the front of house bedroom and the kitchen was back of house so mum wouldn't want to go all the way up to call her down for dinner. This was once most of us had left home as we would round up the troops for dinner usually. I'll have to see if it's still there (and working). 😀

@Mustbetimeforachange

I still struggle too. I keep them for a bit then throw them away but it can be a tough habit to break!

Don't know if I thought this was normal, but a really nice thing my dad did was hide little sweets around the house and pretend the fairies had left them there for us. We'd go in to their room in the morning and every so often he'd say 'i think the fairies have been.' and we'd run off to see what they'd left for us. Often in lampshades and places like that where we had to climb up. We lived near a big chemical works which was all lit up with twinkling lights at night and he told us that's where they lived.
I used to make them presents and leave them out aged about 8.
We had not a set weekly menu, but when we could afford a roast chicken it would be used like the proverbial Mumsnet chicken, in really delicious (mainly vegetable) soup and sandwiches.

@Igglepigglesgrubbyblanket

Don't know if I thought this was normal, but a really nice thing my dad did was hide little sweets around the house and pretend the fairies had left them there for us. We'd go in to their room in the morning and every so often he'd say 'i think the fairies have been.' and we'd run off to see what they'd left for us. Often in lampshades and places like that where we had to climb up. We lived near a big chemical works which was all lit up with twinkling lights at night and he told us that's where they lived. I used to make them presents and leave them out aged about 8. We had not a set weekly menu, but when we could afford a roast chicken it would be used like the proverbial Mumsnet chicken, in really delicious (mainly vegetable) soup and sandwiches.

This is adorable!

@Igglepigglesgrubbyblanket I love the hidden sweets.

@AnneofCleavage Hearing the tales about intercoms, we had one of these to summon the family for meals, wall-mounted at the bottom of the stairs, or if someone had a phone call: we had a certain number of rings for each person. (It was an Edwardian house, with long corridors, so it was a long walk to some of the bedrooms, some of which were two floors up.) If we all happened to be nearby when it was time to eat, my mum wouldn't bother to ring it: she would call out "tingalingaling!"

My grandmother locked all her internal doors at night before going to bed: she had colour-coded keys on a piece of string. Her theory was that burglars couldn't go further than the room they had broken into. However, she changed her mind when some burglars did cause a lot of damage to the doors; she then made the windows more secure instead, with bars fitted to ones near a flat roof.

Thinking about what a previous poster described for birthdays, we had a rule that if a present was too big to wrap, or if it needed an adult to set it up, the child receiving it had to be "wrapped up" first: in other words, blindfolded. Any brothers or sisters who might benefit from it would have their sight taken away as well.

One day at the beginning of the summer holidays, our mum took us out for the morning, and "wrapped us up" when we got back. But dad hadn't finished putting together the big summer present, so she read us a story to keep us occupied while we couldn't see! Eventually we were led outside to have a good feel of something big with metal bars. When our blindfolds were taken off, we thought we were in a big cage: but it was actually a climbing frame.

@iffymiffy 😄 he is a top bloke, my dad

@YetAnotherSpartacus

I've never made it myself - this sounds similar to the ones I buy though
www.easypeasy-lemonsqueezy.co.uk/lincolnshire-plum-loaf-cake-mums/

I'd have it with something like Poacher cheese lincolnshirepoachercheese.com/

I'm visiting my Dad this weekend, I'm sure he has a recipe

I've also got this recipe... I think there's a lot of variations

Thank you! I was expecting plums or prunes though :)

We used to have a 'starter' before Sunday dinner of a big Yorkshire pudding & gravy, just on it's own That's how you're supppsed to have it. You can also have it with jam.

Currently we open our Christmas presents throughout the day. Each child has a pillowcase with their presents in and at given points throughout the day we'll all say 'present time!' and then they can each choose one from their pillow case to open. If I buy right and manage to balance it, it can be one present an hour!

It means that those who like to defer their pleasure can choose to open the small presents and leave the larger ones until later, or the other way around.

When we were young we had presents in the morning (at 'coffee time') but a couple were always held back for just before bed. So there was never that anticlimax feeling that can set in on Christmas Day when you realise you've opened all your presents (and none of them was a pony...) so I've tried to keep that feeling going for my children.

My family always opened the presents starting with the eldest (grandfather) opening one, then next eldest (grandmother) and so on down to the youngest child; then grandfather could open a second present, grandmother a second one, and so on. We would start when our grandparents arrived, which was mid-morning, and hopefully be finished by lunch at 2pm. All paper had to be folded and put to one side for potential re-use. All very restrained.

We do the same now, but that's because our son (autistic) gets overwhelmed if he has too much too quickly. We have to stop opening gifts for him after a few to take a break - and therefore opening his presents takes three days

We had a bell to summon people too, although ours wasn't fixed to the wall. It came from the time when we lived in a three storey house. The system gradually fell into disuse when my parents moved and it was no longer necessary.