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!

[wanderings]

@TumbledGlass That game about putting on clothes while eating chocolate with a knife and fork often comes up on threads about party games. I never understood what the point of the game was - did you?

@Namechangex10000 My brother used to stuff himself with sliced bread when he was hungry, with nothing on it. I used to repeat Jesus's words of wisdom: man does not live on bread alone.

@MulticolourMophead Ah, somebody else does use brown ink!

[Sparklesocks]

@Panicatthegarden I’m glad!! I’ve never looked back

[letsgomaths]

My mum used to do raffles for church and school, and kept the tombola at home. Sometimes we used it at home to make decisions, such as which meal to have, which park to go to, or who would play first in a game. Slips of paper with the choices would be put inside, she would spin it round, and just like she did at school and church, a child would be make the draw; blindfolded so there was no cheating. It was the rule that nobody was allowed to complain after the draw had been made.

[Gwenhwyfar]

"I'm not sure that 'eating out' was as much of a thing when I was young (1960s)"

Wasn't even as much of a thing in the 80s and 90s as it is now. Many more pubs serve food now, for example and some are gastro pubs with restaurant quality foods.
The only eating out I did as a child with my family was the cafe at Tesco or Little Chef when on the road. Otherwise, if we were out and about it'd be a picnic of basic sandwiches.

[Aquamarine1029]

I was friends with a girl, back in the 70's, who never ate the same dinner as her parents. Her mum would cook gorgeous food, but only for her and her husband. The three children were given random things like sliced fruit, half a ham sandwich, bread with butter, etc. She had dinner at my home several times and was astounded that I ate the same food as my parents.

[Aquamarine1029]

I also just remembered a family that never allowed the children into the kitchen. The door was always closed, and if they wanted anything one of the parents had to fetch it.

[akittyisyou]

My house had a ton of weird little quirks that now, as an adult, I can put down to my parents being much older, living very remotely, coming from a background with no money, not having much money themselves, and me being an only child. At the time, though, I was a very strange child and it took me going to university to 'learn to be normal.'

• Whenever I complained that I was hurt or unwell, my parents would give me a "magic sweet" from our medicine box, which I thought tasted vile but often had the placebo effect it was made for. I was in my mid-twenties when I discovered these were wine gums.

• My dad would often 'fancy up' really cheap foods and act as if they were a gourmet treat. "Dak and dip" was tinned ham cut into sticks and eaten with thousand island dressing. "Super noodles" (which I didn't know was just a brand name for years, as we always bought own-brand) were instant noodles cooked with loads of water and a slice of cheese melted into the broth. Canned meatballs with rice were also a full special meal. I had no idea my dad invented some of these combos and thought they were fancy food.

• By the time I was growing up, a lot of food that my parents didn't grow up with had become normal. If it wasn't available in the 80's, it outright wasn't allowed in our house in the 00's, or, if I bought it myself, was allowed but only if they could make fun of it. This included low fat milk, chicken nuggets, salsa, ANYTHING Italian including pizza, pasta, pesto, any low calorie version of anything, granola bars, oreos, curry that wasn't identical to the Chinese takeaway, flat breads... they've eased up on some of this in that they now buy low fat milk and my dad will make the occasional spaghetti bolognese.

• My dad was in multiple bands where he played Irish rebel music. He didn't really listen to music, my mam only listened to talk radio, and I wasn't allowed to pick what was on TV in the evenings when pop music shows would go on, so nobody in our house really knew any modern songs.

• Before leaving the house or going to bed, every door in the house had to be shut. I asked my mam about this recently, and she couldn't tell me why she insisted on it. She still does!

• My parents are HUGE car boot sale fans. I wasn't the brightest child, and thought that everyone got everything from car boot sales. I was maybe ten before I realized if you wanted something like a specific book, you could go into a book shop and buy it. I assumed everyone went to charity shops and car boot sales with the specific thing in mind for months until they found it.

[tulippa]

*@TumbledGlass - I remember playing that game at a party but the Mars bar was on a pile of flour. I enjoyed it at the time!

My weird-ish ones were that my dad made every piece of wooden furniture we owned apart from doors. He had a massive lathe in the back garden and would spends hours making beds, wardrobes, dining tables etc. Our kitchen cupboards never had doors on them because he made the shelving bits of them but didn't get round to doing the doors. I didn't realise you could buy wooden furniture in shops until I was in high school!

Every room in the house had a loud, ticking, chiming clock in it. We would often miss important parts of programmes like the end of murder mystery when they went off. I hate loud clocks now.

[pawpawpawpaw]

wanderings MulticolourMophead apparently Stanley Kubrick liked brown ink : "One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, 'What are you going to do with all that ink?' He said, 'I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.'

[drumming88]

When we were growing up, my mum and dad's house had the loo in the same room as the bath. So if I or my sisters or our mum were on the loo, we'd chat to each other, in the bathroom. The door wouldn't be locked. Thought this was perfectly normal but it certainly shocked my boyfriend!!! We've been married over 30 years now and he still hasn't got used to the fact that my sisters and I can carry on a conversation with one of us on the loo, with the door unlocked and sometimes ajar!

[Butteredtoast55]

Times were so different! We used to really look forward to the Co-op van that came on Tuesdays. If we were lucky our Grandma would get us a treat from the Co-op van and we also loved the library bus. My Dad had grown up in our house. He’d lived there with his parents, two sisters, his grandmother and her brother. In three bedrooms (they later put a partition in one to make it four bedrooms). We didn’t have set meal times but we did have set days that people did certain jobs on like washing on Mondays. Our neighbour used to wring her washing out through a mangle and we loved being able to go and turn that mangle handle.
Everyone was part of a community. When my DH first started coming to our house he was dumbstruck by the fact that people just popped into each other’s houses. His family were all about only going for tea when invited and staying no longer than the allocated polite time dictated by Debrett’s modern etiquette!

[Butteredtoast55]

My DH has also never seen coal-houses before. We had wildly different childhoods!

[ArgumentativeAardvaark]

That game about putting on clothes while eating chocolate with a knife and fork often comes up on threads about party games. I never understood what the point of the game was - did you?
@wanderings the aim is to get to eat as much Mars bar as possible. By the time you have put on all the hats and scarves and gloves and sliced it with the cutlery someone else might have thrown a 6 and so your turn could be over before you got to take a bite. I think the person who ate the last mouthful was the winner.

[iffymiffy]

We played the chocolate game with dairy milk I think.

[s113]

My mum kept a quote book. Any funny things which were said were noted in this very special hard-backed notebook, with the date. This book is one of her prized possessions. A somewhat topical one (extremely outing to anyone who's heard me repeat it), was made by my late and very much loved gran many years ago, on "the sign of peace" in church:

"People sneeze into their hand, and then hold it out and expect you to shake it: it makes you want to keep your gloves on!"

Another one, referring to a baby: "She's failing us with her bugler duty in the mornings."

[wanderings]

I've mentioned it on other threads, but a treat I occasionally had as child was that I was lifted into the air in a basket, told that I was flying, and the scenery below was described to me. I couldn't see that I was only a few inches up because I was blindfolded, but it felt as if I really was flying a long way up! They also tricked me into believing that I had flown from one end of the garden to the other: they'd blindfold me in the centre of the garden, spin me round, walk me towards the house, and make me feel something to "prove" this. But they actually led me in the opposite direction, so that when was allowed to see again, I'd find myself at the bottom of the garden instead. I was well and truly fooled!

I never heard of other families doing this, but I have seen it described in a book of party games, so it probably wasn't my parents' own invention.

[turquoise50]

@TumbledGlass

Christmas cards were always saved and in January we'd sit and cut them up using pinking shears, to be made into gift tags.

I still do that!! 6th January every year, with a bit of sparkly thread (still the same roll of sparkly thread from my childhood, I think!!) to attach them to the presents.

But I hardly have any need for gift tags anymore as DS is pretty much the only person I buy presents for (excluding the odd bottle of wine for neighbours etc), so a couple of years ago I had such a backlog of gift tags from 30+ years of making them (and that's just me - no idea what happened to all my mum's old ones!) that I was able to put together multiple packs of 12 assorted ones and sell them at the school Christmas fair!

I’m a lot more discerning nowadays about which cards get made into tags - and there are fewer cards anyway - so my production line has slowed down a lot, but I still always manage to make a few. DS used to like to punch the holes in the corners when he was little.

The most annoying thing though is when you get a really nice, gift-taggable card, but the person has WRITTEN A DAMN MESSAGE about how much they'd love to see me in the New Year or some such shit ON THE BACK OF THE PICTURE!! That or the charity details printed there. I’m like, 'What's wrong with you people? Don't you GIFT TAG???' I NEVER write on the back of the picture, just in case!

[letsgomaths]

@turquoise50 Here's our family Christmas card idiosyncrasy. The cards were attached to the wall with Blu-tack, on both sides of the double doors between our kitchen and living room. But... ssshh, this is classified information... the pretty ones went on the right-hand side, and the more vulgar ones (think Santa cards, and others which were too cartoon-like for my mum's liking) went on the left, so that their fronts would be less visible.

[turquoise50]

@letsgomaths

Oh we stuck ours up with blu-tak too (mostly in the hall - around the mirror there and all over the closed-in banisters) but I don't think there was a ranking system! I bet if my arty mum had got her hands on it, there would have been, but she delegated the job to me.

I do remember we used to count them regularly and keep a mental tally of how many we received as a family. One year we had over 100, but that was mostly because my mum worked in a school and got cards from all the kids.

[ColdTattyWaitingForSummer]

Ooh.. Christmas cards! My mum had an actual Christmas card list. She would spend ages writing them and addressing them, and I would get to dab the stamps on a damp sponge to make them sticky. (As opposed to licking them.) Cards we received were taped onto long ribbons and then the ribbons were hung in various rooms. When they came down in January I could have the pretty ones to cut up and make collages.

[MrsVMorgan]

-We were never allowed to eat anything in the street accept an ice cream from an ice cream van.
-never allowed out unless we looked immaculate. This would mean we often had to change outfits in the middle of the day etc
-There was no set meal times and no planning till about 5pm on the day we were going to eat it. I am not anal about it but so like to know what I am going to cook/need each week so I can buy the right things from the shops.
-we were usually late. I used to hate that as a child until I was old enough to take myself places as I Iike to be super early!

[turquoise50]

@ColdTattyWaitingForSummer

I have an actual Christmas card list!

Granted, it's a Word document with the addresses so that I can print off labels (but I never have any so usually end up writing them anyway) and it's been whittled down to
a) relatives (mostly aged aged 70+) whom I rarely see or have any other contact with,
b) a handful of old school/uni friends,
c) newish friends and acquaintances whom I want to 'keep in with'
and d) anyone who unexpectedly sends me or DS a card, so it's about half the length of my parents' list which was:
a) anyone they'd ever met
and b) er, that was it really.

But the title of my Word doc is still 'Xmas list' and that's how I think of it.

Do... do people not do that anymore? [Feeling extremely old!]

[EmbarrassingAdmissions]

So many of those that have been mentioned!

Powdered ginger on melon.
Dipping raw rhubarb or a baking apple core in sugar.
Drinking the cooking water of green vegetables like cabbage/sprouts.
Sugar sandwiches.
Vinegar sandwiches (my father had sugar and vinegar on the same piece of bread).
Mustard on bread (like the vinegar, to kill the appetite).

Curtains drawn before the light could go on and always if the fire was lit (to keep the heat in).

Newspapers as bed coverings in Autumn/Winter (not enough blankets).

No television, no telephone, no fridge. No reading newspapers unless they'd be 'approved' first (ie, they'd torn out pages of anything they didn't want us to read). If we visited relatives with a TV then my father would phone (he'd be in the pub and our relatives all had phones) and insist that we would watch a programme that we had to be quizzed on later - and that would be to ensure that we wouldn't watch something of which he disapproved (he'd check the TV listing in the censored newspaper). (My father was a touch controlling.)

[YogiMatte]

Like a lot of others, no eating out, including cafes, apart from one time on holiday when we went to a fish and chip place. When I went for my first meal out in 6th form I thought it was the height of sophistication (it was a chain restaurant). Mum still to this day will not go out for coffees.

Not having any music in the house- parents didn't own a record or tape player and would never listen to any music based radio. Was always envious of cousins who had radio 1 or 2 or local radio on .

We didn't have powdered ginger on melon, but I ended up with one accidentally last week and did consider putting some ginger on it. It is a thing!

[AnneOfCleavage]

TumbledGlass wow was that a 70s style dessert. Mil makes that sometimes: ginger biscuits with whipped cream then sandwiches them all in a caterpillar type line then kiwi and blueberries etc put on top. It's actually really yummy but had no idea it wasn't a new idea of hers. She's an excellent cook and home bakes all sorts of amazing desserts from scratch.