It’s easy to accumulate too many coffee (and tea) cups. First it was vintage collectible sets, scrounged one at a time in flea markets and thrift shops. Then industry conferences and meetings with vendors at work kept me well supplied with complementary mugs. When traveling, it’s even easier to acquire nifty souvenir cups from museum gift shops. But eventually, moving day comes and something has to go.
Before I moved, I gave away lots of the themed coffee mugs, but still held on to certain gifts and favorites from times past. Here’s a small selection of each category —
KEPT: On the left: a travel mug from the Met Museum gift shop in NYC, purchased when we discovered our hotel room had a microwave… bonus! On the right, a teacup fitted with its own infuser.
GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: Harlequin cups and saucers – 1st cousins to original Fiesta Ware, Homer Laughlin Company, 1930s – 1950s, enthusiastically collected in the 1980s.
GONE: To a friend with granddaughters, my dolls’ tea set from my childhood.
GONE: Vintage Fostoria: American Clear. Here they in a quick snapshot taken when I was sorting what to keep and what to release. These were my mother’s, and remarkable because she still had the cups. Most cups eventually got broken… her go-to anger release.
GONE: I had these glass “beaker” mugs before Star Trek – The Next Generation’s Jean-Luc Picard did. (“Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” -?- whatever he’s sipping here looks too dark for Earl Grey) I bought that set in Kansas City in the 1980s at a store called Function Junction. Sadly, they were fragile and didn’t last — and I didn’t have a replicator to make new ones. I’m glad to know the pattern survived until the 24th Century.
I’m looking back at the cups-of-my-life now because I just broke my VERY favorite.
RIP the last coffee cup from a set of four – cherished through four moves. Two of them bit the dust years ago, but up until the last couple of weeks I still had two in use. Then I dropped one. After that, the remaining one cracked, perhaps in sympathy. Here it is in black, in memoriam.
GONE: My Goldilocks cup. See the crack along the bottom? — Glass coffee cup, also from Function Junction in Kansas City, c. 1980s. Some cups are too big, some are too small, but this one was “just right”…
Now I know how hard it is to find a good coffee/tea cup that’s…
- microwaveable
- glass (so I can see it in the microwave)
- mug-style
- large enough for greedy coffee drinkers – 16 oz please
- simple, and attractive
- and for an eco-warrior woman who wants to ‘buy locally,’ at least made in the same country I live in
So – now I know what I want. I’m still interviewing new cups.
Do you have an all-time favorite coffee cup?
Be still my heart, and thank you Google. I just saw that there is one remaining Function Junction store. It’s in Kansas City… something to find on my next trip. Shiny!
Shiny: Something that is great, wonderful, very cool – from Joss Whedon’s TV Series “Firefly”
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Shiny
The screen-grab shot of Captain Picard, above, from “Now pour the tea” An Aesthetic Evaluation of Picard’s Tea Sets
Hoarder Comes Clean 
Your first photo is terrific, I like it the best that reflection is marvelous. My favorite tea is earl grey, so I remember that well from Star Trek Next Generation. 😀
Thanks Cee – now I’m wondering what happened to all the “beaker” cups the TNG props department had left over …
Hard to imagine I would enjoy every word on the topic of someone else’s coffee mugs, their provenance, and their disposal! And yet I did! This was a large category in my own downsizing. Many were easy – not “just right” – but a few unused ones still tugged at me because of their histories. Still, I bid them adieu for the most part and now have a much smaller cabinetful of ones my family and I actually like and use!
You’re exactly right about how they tug at us with their histories. And sometimes they just look sculptural, so they somehow double as art even when they’re not all that functional. I am greatly relieved to hear I’m not the only one who has, or had, coffee mugs to downsize. (uh-oh, just had a flashback of the ones that change when hot water is added: Pangea drifts into continents, for example)