The Ubiquitous Coffee Mug

The ubiquitous coffee mug

When a couple gets married, they often receive a beautiful set of China as a wedding present and a set of everyday dishes. They now have two sets of dishes and probably twelve to eighteen pairs of cups and saucers. Like many people, they won’t use the cups and saucers except for special dinners, because they prefer coffee mugs. So next, they inadvertently start building their coffee mug collection. It starts out innocently enough. First, a couple of cute mugs from their honey moon, next a pair of mugs from their favorite restaurant and then some Holiday mugs to help celebrate the season. Now they’re on a roll. Their employer gives them a worker appreciation mug, they start bringing back one or two souvenir mug from each of their vacations and they give and receive gag mugs. Soon people realize when all else fails buy them a mug and the mugs start rolling in.
Not to worry—there is always the garage sale. And folks don’t mind weeding out their collection and unloading ten or fifteen of their least favorite mugs. The only problem with garage sales is pretty soon one begins to buy other people’s mugs. And the number of mugs again starts to grow. Again not to worry. The interior design folks have the solution. Hang a decorative mug rack on the wall and display your best mugs for the whole world to see.
I got to thinking about the abundance of mugs this morning because I was trying to find room for two new mugs myself. And I’ve been there, done that. I’ve gone through all the steps outlined above. Collecting mugs; ending up with two sets of mugs, the holiday mugs and the regular mugs; to now we “specialize” in handmade mugs.
This all started out as a reform. No more commercial mugs. Just mugs from potters, bought at their pot shop where we could watch them throw the mugs and talk to us at the same time. For a while that worked just fine. Each of us had our favorite mug. We judged them: favorite color, weight and the feel of the handle in one’s hand. We were pleased with ourselves; another successful attack on rampant materialism.
However, it dawned on me this morning as I was admiring our growing collection of handcrafted mugs that I was back in the same old place. I could drink coffee every morning for nearly two weeks and never drink out of the same handcrafted cup twice. If I drank once from all of the mugs and cups in the house including the ones that are strictly for “decoration” I could easily go over three months and never drink out of the same cup or mug twice.
Like most Americans, we’re not wealthy, but it seems that we always have ten or fifteen dollars for a couple of mugs either for ourselves or for gifts. It’s goofy.