My Cigar Box Collection!

Hello everybody!

Does anybody remember a blog post I did back in January, where I talked about a cigar box that my dad gave me one afternoon and I decided to put my papaw’s rock collection in it? Well, if you don’t, I called the post “The Treasure Box” and at the time I thought that was going to be the only box I would be given from my dad, but I was wrong! Since then, I was manged to have three more and yes, I have started my own little cigar box collection on accident!

Just so we’re all on the same page, I don’t smoke cigars or cigarettes! I just like the heavily decorated boxes! My mom told me, “you certainly have a lot of cigar boxes for a person that hates smoking!” It’s true, but I don’t advocate for it though! And I recently said that I just got rid of a bunch of boxes I’ve used for storage for my bookshelf and I keep getting these suckers! Oh, well!

Okay, the first box I am going to talk about is my biggest box so far! It is a white rectangle box with a thin wrapping all around the top of it. The brand of cigars that my dad likes the most are Cubans, of course! This brand is called “My Father Cigars” and it seems to be in production since 1922 and out of the boxes, this is probably my favorite because the top section below is just beautiful! Very elegant despite the fact that what was stored inside of it was tobacco!

It might look great on the outside, but unfortunately it does have a couple of downfalls about it. One is the fact that every box has a latch in the front to “lock” the boxes and this one does not close all the way and so the latch is basically useless! The other bad part of it is that it is very thin. You have to store anything that is flat, so that’s why in my bookshelf tour post I did has it down on my lower shelf because it basically has all of my un-important items that I don’t use a lot of the time!

---

The second (or third) box if you will! I want to say it is the same size of the first box. It’s just not as fancy whereas the treasure box has a more sheen to it and this one isn’t, but I’ll get to that in a minute! The brand of this one is called Nica Puro (I have no idea what it means!) and you see the number “1685” on the box and you automatically think that it would mean a year started production, but I have a theory that it just might be part of the brand itself since it has those numbers all around the border of the box! Like I said, it’s just a theory, nothing’s set in stone here!

Unlike the white one, it’s not even as decorated as the white one so that part kind of sucks but I do use it for more things because it has more room. I have some cards and envelopes, anything of that nature where if I need it or want to store something for later – I can! On the plus side, the latch on this box is a lot better, probably a little too good since everytime I need it I have to tip it over and unlatch it and flip it back over to get it open.

Other than that, I don’t really have any need for it, but like with every addiction I seem to have I can’t say no to it!

---

My nana has sort of promised me that I was allowed to have a couple of my papaw’s cigar boxes too! So far I only have in possession of one box and this is very worn and it is from a company based in New York called “Nickelby” I kept wanting to say “Nickelback” everytime I saw it. I think the main difference between the first two and this box is that when this one was sold, it only cost 5 cents! My dad has a larger box for his cigars and it was about $80! In ways, I don’t want to know how much the others were before he brought them home to me!

After I came home with this and put it into my bookshelf, my dad became very jealous over the fact that I had an older box, one of my papaw’s or his dad’s boxes (we’re still not sure, because papaw didn’t smoke cigars!). When I told nana about how he was acting about it, she found another box and we gave it to him! He’s happy now!

So what do you think? Do you collect any boxes or anything like that? 

Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Bloglovin

My Childhood Oddity | Part 2

Hey guys!

Well, I have a treat for you!

In September of 2014, I wrote a little post about an old rock collection I used to have when I was a kid. My nana found the floral container I used to keep them in at her house. She couldn’t get the top off so I had to take it home for my dad to open and inside were these different rocks and one random sea shell that I must’ve stolen off the floor or something. I honestly have no clue why I would stick a shell in my jar but it’s in there!

I had a lot of fun going through my fairly large collection. I found out that I had a lot of smaller rocks than any of the bigger ones. I probably had better luck finding the smaller ones and that’s why I have so many of them! Well, after I did the pictures and wrote up the blog post about my little childhood oddity and I thought I was done talking about it. On December 4th, my mom came into my room and said my papaw was cleaning and he found a small box of his rock collection of when he was a kid! He gave them to me as an early Christmas present! I have a whole Velveeta box of rocks and it’s heavy as crap!! It’s a two foot job to lift up.

That night I decided to go through the box and see what all he had in his collection. I think, even at my age that rocks are pretty interesting. The ground that our houses, roads and feet rest on have always been here since the Earth was created. I think rocks are small gifts from Mother Earth herself. It doesn’t matter how much we continue to kill her with our destruction, she always gives us little natural gifts to help keep our sanity. My papaw said most of the rocks he collected are from the Rocky Mountains and some place else that I can’t remember, but it does explain some of their shapes and sizes. Quite a few don’t look like he dug them out of the backyard, which I don’t think is a bad thing either!

I had to look through this website afterwards because I was really curious to know what kind of rocks they are! There were some differences in textures between both collections. Majority of them felt rough. Those need extra care because you never know if you will cut yourself on them sometimes. It can happen! He had a lot of bigger ones, like maybe four or five large ones and then one giant rock that to me looks likes a red turd that somehow turned into a rock. Is that too much information? There’s definitely a few shiny, crystal-like, granite ones in the box. Those are always my favorites, even if I don’t know what to call them! Out of all these special rocks, there were a few gravel rocks that were stuffed into the sides of the box. Just because “normal” looking doesn’t mean that they’re lame!

So what do you think? Did you ever collect rocks or something you thought was “cool” as a kid?

Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Bloglovin

My Childhood Oddity

What were you obsessed with as a kid? I mean, serious? Do you remember anything from your childhood that was big with you at such a small age? I have always been in love with caves, dirt, and rocks ever since I can remember. I remember making mud pies with my sister and cousins. Whenever we were at my nana’s, she’d have bubbles, chalk, and spoons. I was into the bubbles and spoons. We only used the spoons to dig up the dirt around the edges of the sidewalks. Every weekend we would do this and I’m starting to wonder how majority of the spoons she still uses are slightly bent. We were a bit rough when it came to certain ones. I had my own spoon that had a gripper so it wouldn’t be such a pain to really down deep into the ground. I loved seeing as you dug your spoon into the ground that there was a narrow line of tan dirt. Sometimes we’d pull up worms and then stab them a hundred times to see it squirm. I‘m going to hell, ain’t I? I remember once that we had share spoons because we kept dirtying nana’s spoons in one or two days that she didn’t want to run out of them before they ate supper. That ended up causing a bitter fight between my sister and I, because one of us didn’t want to share. I’m not throwing the blame on her though, it was probably me not wanting to share with her in the first place. We also had fun with chalk and bubbles too. At the time, I had very good flexibility in my lower half. So I could do the bubbles myself without anybody else holding it for me. Chalk wasn’t my forte. They were either too thin or too thick for me to use. so I only played with the bubbles and dirt.

As a kid though, it wasn’t just those things that kept me entertained. The start of my love with rocks had to start around I was six years old. I can’t think of myself older and be collecting them. I remember as the years continued on, my little tin can stayed in a corner of my nana’s house collecting dust, just waiting for me to cone back. Almost like that scene in Toy Story 2 where Jessie and her original owner Emily loves her and plays with her but once as she grows up and discovers makeup, her love of her childhood things fades. She ends up saling Jessie along with the rest of her childhood things. Instead of me throwing it away in the trash, I grabbed it and when I got home, dad unhinged the lid and opened it up. My nana said it hasn’t been opened for 15 or 16 years. Which mom told me I would have been 7 or 8 years old at the time. These rocks are old. When I took them out of the box or can, I had ten pieces of little rocks. I actually 11 of the bigger ones with the lone little sea shell. I’m still confused about the shell and how it ended up in there. There were so many differences in the rocks, I do think I snatch one from my grandparents driveway, but I have no idea where I must’ve gotten the rest. The textures from the bigger ones are kind of interesting. Two are incredibly smooth and there’s a big one gray rock that has circle edge at the top of it that’s white. If you hold it up to good light, it kind of sparkles like it has diamonds in it. That’s why as kids, we used to think we were pirates and that nana’s dirt had gold in it because of the tan line in the dirt. We were a little nutty! I must’ve been able to grab a hold of the smaller ones easily when I was younger as to why I have so many. I was trying to pull them off my floor and I couldn’t get my toes around them to get a good grip. Now it’s actually difficult to grab them with my toes, they didn’t want to go back in the can.

I was thinking about something. Our neighbors have a little girl named Chevy and she’s fairly smaller in age than I was when I became so interested in rocks, but she loves them! However, she loves throwing them at people more than anything, but I thought it would nice to get her to collect them instead of throwing them. Inside the barn are rocks everywhere, there are fairly large rocks inside and I thought it would neat to get her to collect maybe these bigger ones. I might be getting ahead of myself as she is only two years old, but my mom and I just don’t understand how much she runs around in the barn without shoes or socks on, because to us, even I was thinking it, that would hurt the bottoms of our feet being stick with those rough and sharp edges and all the running she does! No wonder she’s been wanting rides on my wheelchair! Now that the temperature’s dropping in the evenings, I’ve actually seen her with tennis shoes on and it’s so different because I’m normally seeing her barefoot or in somebody else’s flip-flops. My mom had to go to the house one day while she was over at the barn, Chevy just went with her and came back with my mom’s flip-flops on. Tiny feet in big shoes, you would assume she’d fall on herself but she never did. That takes some talent, at least it’s got to, because I’d think it would hurt to have bigger shoes on. I’m just glad I don’t have to wear any kind of shoes. Socks drive me insane whenever I do have to wear them. Anyways, back to the rocks thing. I might talk to her momma and see what she thinks if it would produce good results or not. If not, it’s cool!

the smoothest rocks

the roughest and biggest.

the lone sea shell