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Claim: Description of how laundry was done in bygone days imparts "count your blessings" message.
Example: [Collected via e-mail, 2004]
Origins: The It has also been kicking about for a very long time. While its folksy spelling is in some versions further exaggerated and in other iterations cleaned up, the order of the items and their contents remain relatively stable. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand reports encountering it in a 1981 South Carolina folklore journal, which had in turn found it in a 1975 newspaper. His article about this item of contemporary lore prompted a woman to send him a typed copy of a Our own find of a closely related item comes from a book published in 1959:
[Cerf, 1959]
While undoubtedly these poems and lists have been around for quite a while, it is not necessarily true they date back to the days supposedly being lauded. The desire to view earlier eras through rose-tinged lenses did not begin with this generation; nostalgia for "the good old days" is an ordinary part of the human experience. Just as each generation views its young people as going to hell in a handbasket, so does it regard the times of its grandfathers as simple, honest, and more wholesome. Forgotten are dread disease that snuffed out so many lives, crushing poverty, and widespread discrimination against anyone who was not both white and male; instead, the long hours of back-breaking hard work endured by previous generations are presented as having been a matter of choice, and a noble one at that. Lists and poems like these are far more about how we imagine our forebears to have cheerfully shouldered their hardships rather than how they actually lived them.
An anonymous friend mailed me the following little poem. I wish somebody could identify the author: Grandmother, on a winter's day, milked the cows, slopped the hogs, and got the children off to school; did a washing, mopped the floors, washed the windows, and did some chores; cooked a dish of home-dried fruit, pressed her husband's Sunday suit, swept the parlor, made the bed, baked a dozen loaves of bread, split some firewood and lugged it in, enough to fill the kitchen bin; cleaned the lamps and put in oil, stewed some apples she thought would spoil; churned the butter, baked a cake, then exclaimed, "For goodness' sake, the calves have got out of the pen," and went out and chased them in again; gathered the eggs and locked the stable, back to the house and set the table, cooked a supper that was delicious, and afterward washed up all the dishes; fed the cat and sprinkled the clothes, mended a basketful of hose; then opened the organ and began to play "When you come to the end of a perfect day." Barbara "fond remembrances of things that never were" Mikkelson Last updated: 18 February 2006 Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2008 by snopes.com. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.  Sources:
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