Fun pub discussion last night - things your kids will never know or experience

[iemitsu]

275. I was enslaved on my grandfolk's dairy farm

before they even had a car.
They had a tractor but didn't get a used Chevy until I was 12 years old (a horse and wagon took them to town). They still milked cows by hand and put up all the food they ate. It was hard work but I remember those days very fondly.

What surprised me, a couple of years ago, was my discovering that high school aged girls didn't know how to thread a needle or sew a button back onto a shirt.
I was having some students make simple dolls for a larger art project they were working on, and was taken aback to find that many of the students had never sewn anything. Three girls in one class struggled to get a thread through the eye of a needle then tied the knot just behind the eye, expecting to pull the thread through fabric that way. They did not even cut the thread from the spool so the set-up was needle, knot, thread to eternity. What were they going to sew that way?

Later, I discovered that people don't have button jars any longer. No one keeps clothing until it is good only for rags. No one cuts the buttons off worn clothes. Old clothes go to charity, thrift stores, the Goodwill, or yard sales.
I think buttons that make it through more than one generation in a family are cool.