When the Party is Over

 

"The party is over," declared CNN Business last week. ABC News chimed in: Tupperware "lifts the lid" on its financial woes as it voluntarily initiated Chapter 11 proceedings on September 17. Known for its "once iconic" plastic food storage containers, developed post-World War II to "help war-weary families save money on costly food waste," the company has faced a combination of financial downturns through dwindling sales and rising costs of raw materials and shipping. 

While readers of A Family Tapestry may not be so interested in the latest financial news, those of us fascinated with family ephemera and material culture may pick out a useful strand in the theme of passing traditions once held dear by our more recent ancestors. How many of us can recall a mother or grandmother who attended a Tupperware party? Or taught us how to "burp" a Tupperware lid? While we are not talking about long-forgotten culture of our great-great-grandmothers, this, too, belongs to the collection of items of day-to-day living that are, before our eyes, passing into the heap of forgotten historic trivia.

While we are chasing those elusive brick-wall ancestors of prior centuries, we can't forget that we may be the missing link to passing along the minutiae of life familiar to the "ancestors" we, ourselves, knew personally. I'm encouraged when I see bloggers like Sheryl Lazarus intent on not only sharing the writings of her own grandmother in her blog, but delving deeper into the day-to-day details of that grandmother's life, surroundings, and culture.

Take, for instance, her focus on a devil's food cake from her grandmother's diary and an updated version, compared in her February 27, 2012, blog post in A Hundred Years Ago. Taking a magnifying glass to the details of our near ancestors' lives may be enlightening—possibly even helping us understand them a little bit more. After all, can you, for instance, name all fifty seven of Heinz's "varieties"? If your life was filled with versions of this Heinz advertisement a hundred years ago, perhaps you could. Surely your grandmother could.

These are the too-little-to-notice details which filled our near-ancestors' days, the ephemeral traces of what life was like for them. Too quickly gone, spotting such details, for the ones who lived them, would bring back memories just as surely as hearing a strain from one of the top-forty hits from your high school years might flood you with an avalanche of reminiscences.

So, yeah, while Tupperware may be having its financial woes—not to mention detractors of plastic manufacturing in general—what we are seeing before our very eyes might be the passing of an era, an institution so familiar to our own parents and grandparents that it became almost invisible for its ubiquity in their lives. While clutching a Tupperware bowl would certainly not bring back to life a cherished grandmother, we can at least vicariously live a small part of her reality through these now-fleeting tokens which once made her life's everyday routine what it was.