About Thrifty Terrors

Welcome to Thrifty Terrors!

This is the requisite introductory post, which will explain what this blog is about. I fully expect that no one will read it (you all want to get to the funny stuff, right?), but it's here for those dedicated few who are completists.

Why thrift stores?

For years, I have been a hardcore thrift-store shopper.  The majority of my clothing and home furnishings are from secondhand stores. I'm basically a cheap person (why spend $50 on a new pair of jeans when I can buy a hardly-worn pair for $5, and they're even pre-shrunk?), and I'll confess that I enjoy the challenge of finding unique and interesting items for a fraction of retail price.  I've gotten so good at it that I even take requests, now; my family calls my ability to find things at thrift stores a superpower.

Why terrors?

However, there's a darker side to thrift stores:  The grayware that wouldn't sell at regular stores.  The weird items of clothing that you can't imagine anyone putting on their body on purpose.  The gifts, still in original packaging, that were so awful they couldn't be re-gifted. The bizarre trinkets from someone's midcentury kitsch collection, donated en masse after a relative passed away.

Mind you, I have nothing against kitsch.  In fact, I have a great appreciation for the humorously bizarre:  My family once took a summer vacation to drive down every extant mile of Route 66, stopping into each remaining tourist trap.  I have played mini-golf among concrete dinosaurs.  I have paid money to visit "mystery spots" along old highways.  I have ugly ceramic figurines and old plastic toys and weird family memorabilia in my house, so I understand that emotional attachment has nothing to do with the attractiveness or usefulness of such items.

I also understand that people have different tastes, and what looks silly to one person might inspire a strong emotion in another.  For example, this sort of thing is not to my taste, but I recognize that somebody somewhere probably thinks it's cute:

Cutesy cherub thing falling on its head. Meh.

On the other hand, there are things in this world that any rational person, no matter how emotionally attached, must admit are a little bit strange:

"Peeeeekaboooo... I seeeeeeeee you!"

Over the years of my thrift-storing, I had occasionally taken photos of weird items to share with friends and laugh, but what pushed me over the edge to start this blog was a set of ceramic kitchen containers at the local Goodwill store.  These containers were special -- they didn't say Flour or Sugar, like normal canisters.  Instead, each one was imprinted with a terrible three-dimensional transfer of The Last Supper, turning Christ and his disciples into amorphous blobs of glazed clay that someone, somewhere, had once lined up in a row on their kitchen counter.  And looked at.  And possibly eaten food from.

Sadly, I didn't take a photo then -- but the longer I thought about this travesty (did we really need to replicate da Vinci -- badly -- on made-in-China kitchenware?), the more convinced I was that someone needed to share such amazingly tasteless things with the world.

And that, dear reader, is what I intend to highlight in this blog.  The bizarre; the disturbing; the oh-dear-goodness-what-were-they-thinking sort of kitsch.  The accessories that would have looked out of place even in the wildest eras of fashion.  The merchandise that never should have been produced for the consumer market in the first place.

And most importantly...

It's all in good fun.  Yes, I'm snarking about things that once belonged to real people; I recognize that there is probably a risk of offending someone.  My goal is not to make fun of the people who owned (or invented, or marketed) these items; it's just to point out the inherent humor of the silly things we become attached to (particularly when taken out of context).

And bear in mind that I am just as ready to mock myself and my own weird collections as anyone else's.  Just to prove that, here's a picture of me being stomped on by a dragon: