Every family has one. Every family needs one. Every family has their own version of an Aunt Bethany – the short-stacked older woman with the slightly off-key wardrobe, the twisted humor, and the crazy conversations. Ours was named Virginia or as she liked to be called Aunt Ginni.
Aunt Ginni was married to my maternal uncle, well actually, he was my great uncle but we just thought of him as our uncle. Ginni liked to “dress to the 9’s”, but sometimes it was a bit over the top. She liked her diamond jewelry, bright lipstick, and high-heel shoes since she was short in stature. She often liked for passers-by to think she was a “rich bitch.”
She was woven into our everyday lives. Birthdays, holidays, weekends, and vacations were spent with Aunt Ginni and Uncle Hamer. We spent enough time together that decades later, I still have an endless supply of stories.
Aunt Ginni loved garage sales so you could almost guarantee Thursday through Saturday she would be driving around looking for the best treasures from other people’s hand-me-downs. One of the things she enjoyed was to haggle on a price. There could be a lonely drinking cup marked for twenty-five cents and somehow she would get them down to a dime. Once in the car, she would proclaim what a great find that was because now she was going to resell that cup in her garage sale for fifty-cents and make a huge profit.
Ginni was thrifty that way. Always looking for the best deal, the biggest sale, and clearance racks were her ultimate best friend. Now, there is nothing wrong with being thrifty. I have my own rules on purchasing items, but Ginni’s were a bit…well, extreme.
She never left a restaurant without stuffing her purse with salt/pepper packets, Sweet-N-Low packets, napkins, and even ketchup packets. They could afford to buy these things, but I think she enjoyed the hunt.
Ginni loved to recycle gifts. My dad often received these kinds of presents from her. How did we know? Because she would tell on herself!
Dad would open a box containing a bottle of aftershave, and Ginni would laugh as she announced that she had bought Hamer a Christmas present at the mall and the aftershave was a “free gift”. She’d also take her card club gifts – kitchen towels or potpourri – and re-gift them to someone else.
A whole new take on being thrifty!
She would quite often buy Christmas gifts on special discount the day after Christmas to give the following year. Nothing wrong with that if you remember what you bought. More times than not she would tell us the following Christmas that “I bought something else for you but I can’t remember where I put it.” Or, as you were unwrapping your gift she would realize she put the wrong gift tag on it and would command for you to stop opening it and “give that to your sister”. Another favorite was if she bought us the same thing and one of us would begin opening before the other was ready. She would throw her arms in the air and say “no, no, no you need to wait and open those together…and don’t look at each others only your own.”
Another favorite holiday clearance for her was to buy us Easter baskets on Easter Monday and then save them until the following year. Again, toys would be fine, but those milk chocolate Easter bunnies turned a different shade of brown and had a certain crunch to them. Marshmallow peeps became Cement Chicks. Unfortunately, the candy would be found under File 13.
I have decades of stories about Aunt Ginni, and this is only the beginning. She was a rule breaker, opinionated, impossible to embarrass, and had a saucy mouth. She drove us crazy, made us laugh until we cried, and somehow managed to do both at the same time. Every family has an Aunt Bethany. Ours just happened to be named Ginni.
Until next time,
-Molly