I inherited a set of red-and-white china that belonged to my great-grandmother, each piece showing lovely, detailed prints of the “Castles of England.” I inherited the plates, coffee cups, saucers, soup bowls, and pasta bowls, but I have come to learn that the set includes even more pieces, including tea cups (different from the coffee cups), gravy boats, pitchers, and a large, lidded soup tureen. I snagged the water pitcher a few years ago at an auction, and the soup tureen has been spotted at a local Peddler’s Mall with a $50 price tag that seems more and more reasonable every time I visit.
In our house, this china is all we use on a daily basis, whether the kids are grabbing a plate of leftover mac and cheese late at night or we are sitting down to a fully set table with friends. We did the whole plastic toddler cup thing when the children were very little, but as soon as they could handle proper dishes we let them use the same nice dishes as the adults. Of course, they’ve dropped a few over the years (especially my youngest boy who seems to have some kind of curse), but it’s easy enough to replace individual plates with just a little work on eBay. The loss is small compared to the gain: raising my children in an environment saturated by beauty, loveliness, culture, dignity, and elegance.
Lots of people inherit china, but most people don’t actually use it. It’s not exactly polite to psychoanalyze people who think differently than I do, but I suspect most people have a type of phobia around using their nice things—call it kalochreiophobia since we like Greek and Latin roots around here.
I understand one side of this fear. There really is something precious about my great-grandmother’s china. I have no sympathy with the view that “things are just things” if by that we mean that material objects hold no worth or that it doesn’t matter what dishes we use. Such a quasi-Gnostic view ignores our nature as embodied beings with a faculty for perceiving beauty, at once sensuous and spiritual, who live in a physical environment and eat physical food off of physical plates—it matters, then, whether the food becomes cuisine and the plates become works of art.
I believe the fear of using the plates, however, goes to the other extreme. In a different sense, then, we should respond, “things are just things.” What do the plates even exist for if not to be used? Who else should enjoy my great-grandmother’s plates besides her great-great-grandchildren? Suppose that I did keep them pristine behind some glass in a china cabinet, or worse, in a cardboard box in some storage unit. What then?
I’ve seen what happens to such sets. They are auctioned off to strangers, the complete sets often split up into parcels. (That’s how I get the replacement plates on eBay.)
Sometimes the thought seems to be that the plates will be used one day—when the occasion is just right. But the right occasion never seems to come. Meanwhile, the years of childhood pass by using ugly plastic alternatives that are more suitable, the thinking goes, for the grubby recklessness of little hands.
It matters more to me, however, what beauty my children experience on a day-to-day basis than what I would hypothetically set before a visiting foreign dignitary. As a parent, I owe it to my children to surround them, to the best of my ability, with everything that elevates and ennobles their souls. In classical education circles, we can sometimes overestimate the role of explicit verbal teaching in this elevating and ennobling process and underestimate the role of simple day-to-day living in the physical environment of the home. The art you put on your walls is just as important as the books you read aloud.
For some people, the worry seems to be about money. This is the easiest fear, however, to assuage. As an avid lover of auctions, antique malls, and estate sales, I can assure you that many fine things are really much cheaper than the junk one buys at a big box store. When we were first married, my wife and I thought we were being so responsible and prudent by buying some of our furniture at Ikea and Value City. I am much chagrined and downright horrified to admit to you that we thought we were saving money by purchasing a fake leather sofa for $300. Within two years the strange synthetic membrane posing as leather had begun to disintegrate in the sun, leaving little black flakes on our clothing whenever we sat down. My older self now knows that $300 can go a very long way with a little intelligent shopping in second-hand markets. I picked up a genuine leather Hancock and Moore reading chair for my office at auction for $50, and believe it or not, my father scored the sofa in our music room for $1 (plus tax).
I hope you remember your own pristine china plates, then, the next time you are about to hand your children a stack of plastic in garish colors (made slightly less garish, admittedly, by the whitish rind developing after too many times through the wash). Break out that china, set the table, and clip a few flowers from the garden. Little touches make an enormous difference. Do it on a Thursday evening even when it’s just for leftovers. It doesn’t have to be haute couture and exhausting. Don’t wait for a special occasion. Instead, normalize a day-to-day atmosphere of beauty.
If you take this advice, get ready for some chipped plates and stained silk. That’s simply the cost of handling beautiful things rather than merely looking at them through glass. With a touch of good humor, however, those chips and stains can hold their own kind of charm. Family objects with imperfections retain a memory of where those imperfections came from; spotless objects are anonymous. (Just try to remember that when your six-year-old drops the third glass in a week.)
Use your nice things. Treat them carefully, by all means, and teach your children to treat them carefully too, but use them all the same. Use them up. Even with the greatest care, they won’t last forever, and you can’t take them to heaven even if they did. Their whole reason for existing is the little adornment and lovely usefulness they bring to human life for a time.
Dr. D. T. Sheffler is a professor with Memoria College and Memoria Academy and has taught philosophy, logic, Latin, and history at the University of Kentucky, Georgetown College, and Asbury College.