Hope Chests: a lost tradition

In addition to writing, I love to create things and at the moment I am creating the shabby chic home decor. Some I sell in my shop online, some I keep in an old vintage trunk for one day with the hope of having a real shop.

After putting an item in the old trunk yesterday and closing the lid, I was reminded of my hope chest that I had when I was young. It was a cedar chest passed to me from a great-aunt. It still had some of her things in it and some I left in like her hand-stitched quilt tops (which I still have), sheets with hand-crocheted edging, salt and pepper shakers. I added to the chest through the years with my own mother’s flatware, glassware and dishes that had been saved for me my whole life. I added some towels and sheets and such, all which I saved for my marriage. The day finally came when I would remove them from the hope chest and pack them into a trunk to move thousands of miles away to Hawaii. I could take but one trunk and it was so comforting to have so many special things that I had saved for my new married life. 

It dawned on me after recalling this warm memory that this is a tradition that is likely completely lost today (except maybe in a world like the Amish or something similar). I realized that young women are no longer encouraged to prepare for a home and a family, and it has become out of fashion for a young woman to desire a husband, home and family as her goal in life. I think this is sad and a tremendous loss to our feminine core. In our contemporary society we are told we can do anything; we are encouraged to do it all. We are encouraged to do everything except the one thing that is the very essence of who we are as women.

I came of age in the seventies at a time when Mary Tyler Moore had shown us there was another way; that we could strike out on our own, choose a career, forego the traditional route. Enjoli perfume commercials encouraged us that we could “bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan,” and the women’s movement was in full swing. As independent and rebellious as I was, still neither the influence of media and society or peer pressure could override my own nesting instincts nor the nurturing of my beloved grandmother. 

When it came time, I tried my best to let my own daughter know that she had a choice yes, that she could go out there and be anything she wanted to be but I also let her know that she could choose to be a wife and a mother and to raise a family.

Traditions are important, if only to retain who we are and where we came from. I am proud to have come from a long line of women who fully embraced their true feminine nature, raising families and remaining committed to those families long after having them. And no, most of them did not have a choice or the choices we as women have today but let us remember that it should be a choice, and it is still ok to choose to be a homemaker and raise a family. It is ok to hope and prepare for a loving home and future. It is ok to encourage young women to do this, or at least to let them know that it is still not only a choice but their inherent right. Even if the hope chest is simply a preparation for life, for womanhood, it is a loving way to move forward from the bounds of childhood home into a new life, whatever that life may hold. It is a tradition worthy of reviving and carrying on.

Many blessings. 

Cheryl Yale-Bruedigam, CYI-250

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About Cheryl Yale-Bruedigam

Cheryl Yale-Bruedigam, the angels’ author, has been writing spiritually for thirty years. With undergraduate studies in English and women's studies, she devoted over a decade of research and writing to women’s studies and women's spirituality. For the past five years, she has been diligently working in publishing a series of angelic books as well as "The New Age of Christ." 

Bruedigam is a certified yoga and meditation instructor. She lives in New Mexico with her husband.

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