Until this fall, there was a set of dishes in our house that had never held a single meal.
Gold rims, little gray leaves, and not one chip. My mother-in-law gave them to us when we got married, almost forty years ago.
Not one chip, because we never used them. Not once.
For most of those years, they sat in a taped-up box in the basement. When I cleared out the basement last spring, that was the one box I couldn’t decide about. So I carried it upstairs and set the dishes in the dining room hutch, next to six crystal glasses from our wedding and a gravy boat I couldn’t remember filling.
They looked lovely there. And they still never got used.
My mother’s four place settings were a different story. They live in my kitchen cabinet, and I’ve eaten off them every Sunday morning since she passed. It’s still my favorite part of the week.
One morning in September, I stood in front of the hutch with my coffee and asked myself a simple question. Which of these dishes would I really miss?
I had no idea. So I decided to find out.
If you’ve ever wondered what to do with good china you never use, here’s what happened when I used mine every single day for a month.