The Picnic Basket

My family (that is my growing-up-years family) didn't have a Coleman ice chest, or a styro-foam container, but we did have a picnic basket.

I loved that thing. It was made of wicker and it had a hinged top -- it was hinged in the center on two sides of the center post that held the handle. These two images are similar to the one we had. the one on the left is almost dead on, except we weren't fancy and didn't have a lining in ours. The one on the right is the same style, except ours had a wooden handle. You get the picture.

We had another basket which I found out is called an "English Tea Basket" but it was empty of any of the "tea" stuff that comes in those types of baskets. Mostly that basket was something we children played with when we played "picnic."

So, whenever we went on a picnic, we didn't have a "cooler" to keep the potato salad from going bad. But I don't recall that we ever got ill from warm potato salad either. Maybe we built up a tolerance to whatever you can get from bad mayonnaise.

When we went on our picnics --which were few and far between -- mom would pack the basket carefully and would get everything in the basket including paper plates, cups, plastic utensils and she did have a LARGE thermos container for drinks, which I recall was usually some sort of Kool Aid.

So many things were "invented" as I was growing up. Thermoses of the non-glass type were new on the market when I was growing up. Prior to that there were thermoses, mostly the two cup variety which had a glass liner. How well I remember taking my thermos to school in the morning and finding that someone had dropped it, and I had a glass milkshake! It was a happy day when the new "extruded plastic" thermoses were put into lunch boxes. Our family went through the glass-type thermoses very quickly. It seems that no matter how careful we were, we were always braking them.

So, mom had one of the newer type heavy-duty "Thermos" containers. It held two gallons of drink -- enough for our family of six for one day.

Of course, Tupperware was coming out about the time I hit the teenage years, and mom was happy to get in line and get her fair share of that product, including pitchers in which you could carry drinks to picnics that were guaranteed NOT to spill in transport. NOT!!! They all leaked a little!

But that picnic basket. It was stored on a shelf (built in under the bay window in the upstairs) in the basement along with a few other rarely used items, such as the English Tea Basket, skates, some Christmas things (most Christmas things were in THE TRUNK), and I think I recall my first doll stroller, which was really something my father's cousin Alberta had when she was a girl, so it was really old when I got it, and it lay in a heap waiting for someone to fix it on that shelf with the picnic basket and the picnic thermos.