Goose Kitchens

Once, when Andy and I were newly married, we were Christmas shopping for his mom, and I asked what type of gift he had in mind, and he said, “I don’t know, something with apples on it, she loves apples.”

But like, did she love apples? 

They moved into a beautiful new home when Andy was a senior in high school, and the large kitchen was decorated with apple themed wallpaper border, and from that moment on, every gift that woman recieved had an apple on it. 

We did the same thing to my mom, and her rooster kitchen. Is the traditional 30 year wedding gift a resin rooster butter dish, because according to the old timey gift shop inside Cracker Barrel it is.

When I purchased my grandparents home late last year, it took months of sorting and pruging through decades of stuff before we could even move in. Did you know you can have a dumpster in your driveway for 7 months, because my poor neighbors did.

One afternoon Andy met me at the house after work, and he found me on floor of the kitchen, surrounded by stacks and stacks of blue and white goose plates, yellow aged and stained goose embroidered towels, and chipped glass salt & pepper shaker geese. 

My eyes welled up, and all I could say was, “what the hell did we do to this woman?”

In my whole entire life, I never once heard my oma share with me a love for geese. Watching Hello Dolly and hiding her pack of long fancy cigarettes under the cushion of the couch, yes, but a goose, never. 

And geese are the worst of all the birds. They are mean and they shit everywhere, they are not kitchen icon material. 

One day my grandma probably pointed at a pillow with a goose on it in a shop somehwere, and was like, “idk that’s kinda cute I guess,” and everyone around her made it her whole personality.

Maybe this happens because it’s easier to buy goose towels and apple placemats and rooster egg timers, than it is to actually talk to the women in our lives, and find out what the hell actually brings them joy, or worse yet, find out that maybe that joy is complicated, hard to find, or missing entirely. 

It’s 1994 and we’re there buying my grandma bird napkin rings, while she’s at home wondering why no one asks her to play the piano anymore. 

“Please don’t rooster kitchen me, Andy.” I say to him every gift-giving holiday. 

I know that I am insanely hard to shop for because I spend the whole year buying myself whatever the hell I want like a racoon with a debit card, but the thought of my legacy in this family being reduced to a Kirkland’s kitchen theme kills me. 

In fact, I encourage all our daughters to remain complicated and complex, yet unapologetically annoying, you know, to really weed out the haters. To walk around like unsolvable rubix cubes, making the people that love them have to dig a little deeper than wallpaper boarder to really figure them out. 

I get online and I worry we’re raising a whole new generation of roosters tea towels because we make it so incredibly difficult for people to like things out loud? They share excitement and joy, and there we are shitting on it as too basic, too materialistic, too saturated or annoying. 

(see: Stanley cups, the whole entire Barbie movie and ensuing quotes, Eras tour photos, glimpses of Tayor at Chiefs games, etc.)

So instead we’re bullying all these women to just shut up into themselves, so they can open your low hanging fruit of a gift, and smile as if you know exactly who they are, and you can feel good about the minimal effort you put into shopping, as well as the lord’s work you’re doing online making people feel frivilous and stupid. They call that a twofer. 

“Thank you for this apple inspired Live, Laugh, Love sign, it’s exactly what I wanted. I cannot wait to hang it above the sink.”