b....is for....

I'm joining in again with Toni from ChickChat in her weekly A-Z meme.

b is for boxes.

Boxes.
I love them.
They come in all shapes and sizes.
Some empty, some pre-filled, mmmm chocolates.....

When I was very small, hat boxes were a common sight on the shelf of many a woman's wardrobe.
These held the "best" hat, the one brought out on Sundays to wear to church, or maybe to wear to a wedding.

The beginning of the year brought boxes that held new school shoes.

When we moved house, as we did so often, boxes were begged from friends or from shops that had empty ones after delivery of their goods and we would fill them with our books and toys.

Years later my own children had large toyboxes for their toys and when we moved these were simply closed, locked and loaded onto a truck, no repacking necessary.

Back in the 1990s, I worked in a shoe factory, where one of my jobs was to inspect the finished pairs of shoes and pack them into their shoe boxes, then deliver the filled trolley to the warehouse section.
I had an old shoebox there too, to hold my morning tea and lunch things.  My coffee mug and teaspoon, boxes of cup-a-soup packets, a small box of biscuits.
I'd taken it home and decorated it with images cut from magazines, of coffee cups, plates of cake etc.
 
I remember the year my last baby was just learning to crawl.
We'd just moved house (again) and it was late autumn so still sunny and warm for playing outside.
When all the moving boxes were empty, we opened up both ends and laid them along the back lawn in  a long "train" and the baby had lots of fun crawling through it with the older kids.

Then one morning we woke to find it had rained overnight and the box train was a mess of cardboard mush.

Boxes really are everywhere. So many foodstuffs are packaged within them. I'm sure you can think of at least a dozen off the top of your head.

 Cereal for breakfast, teabags for morning tea, frozen fish fingers for lunch perhaps.
Mac and cheese for after school snacks for those teenaged boys who seem to be permanently hungry.
Dinnertime? A box of pasta...although pasta also comes in cellophane packaging.

There are wooden boxes that hold jewellery,

and fancy lacquered boxes that hold anything you'd care to put in them.

Archive boxes that hold memories, or office files that go back into the history of the firm maybe.
Very large boxes hold whitegoods such as washing machines, refrigerators, clothes dryers.
Cardboard boxes hold the plastic bags that supermarkets use to pack your groceries into.
Groceries which are often packed in their own boxes, sometimes unnecessarily.
Where would we be without boxes? 

There are insulated boxes that you fill with ice to carry foods and drinks to a barbecue.

Habitat boxes that you might install in your backyard for birds to nest in.

There are big metal boxes that hold our letters that we post to loved ones.


If you should decide to join us in our weekly A-Z meme, we'd be happy to have you.
Simply leave a link back to Toni and have fun with it.