Favourite Things Friday

Welcome to Favourite Things Friday. I can't wait to see and hear about your Favourite Things! (For those of you with google reader, this has probably appeared 6 times already while I tried to make Blogger put this post in the right place instead of under my Slack Tea Thursday post- why must Blogger torture me so? )

The idea is that you write a post about one of your favourite things and then link to this post so everyone who is participating this week can come and have a sticky beak. If you want to take the button from my sidebar and pop it in your post that's cool too because apparently due to the miracle of the Internet and technology, it will link back to all the FTF posts I've written. I don't pretend to understand how that works. It just does. I don't need to understand because Elizabeth is my own personal html coder. Thanks E!

You can share anything you like. A book, a thought, food, a craft project, something in your house, a person , a place...that's the beauty of FTF ...it's about your favourite things.

Let me preface my favourite thing for this week by saying we are not really a family who keeps things and hands them down through the generations. We are more of a "chuck it away it's rubbish" kind of family apparently. Which makes me really sad because I love old things and am quite sentimental about family stuff and really envy reading about people who have their great great grandmother's pincushion, or their grandfather's blunderbuss, or something else wonderfully exciting and steeped in family history. As compensation I buy other people's old things at op shops and make up romantic stories about how they came to be in my possession. This is probably the oldest "family thing" I own.

My favourite thing this week is a piece of jewellery my Nanna gave me years ago. The beauty for me is that it belonged to my great grandmother who was born in 1881 in Ballarat, Victoria. She passed away 55 years ago , so this is old. It's probably one of the few pieces of jewellery she ever owned aside from her wedding ring because they were not well off people. It's rose gold, and has a picture inside of a small child. Since she had 13 children it's difficult to work out who it might be and there's nobody left in my family to tell me. I really wish I had asked my grandmother who it might be before she passed away two years ago. I've never worn it because I'm scared of losing it. Every now and then I take it out and try to imagine the woman it belonged to originally, who I never met and have only heard about.

Family legend says that she and my great grandfather were born three weeks apart in the same place, lived in the same street all their young lives, and then married at the age of 20. When my great grandfather passed away my great grandmother died three weeks later of a "broken heart" according to my Nanna. From my Nanna's accounts I don't think Great Grandma had an easy life, so I hope this necklace was given to her for a special occasion, and that she loved it as much as I do. I love the mystery attached to it. I feel more bound to these two women because something they owned and enjoyed is now mine for safe keeping until it's time to pass it on to someone else in our family.

Thanks for visiting and sharing this with me. Now it's your turn!