It's almost axiomatic that anytime after Christmas is over, if you see a blue metal tin that used to hold Danish Butter Cookies sitting around someone's house, it contains someone's sewing kit. You know, a pair of dull scissors, two dozen random spools of off-color thread, a jar with 27 buttons, none of which match, and half of an iron-on patch for mending knee holes.
It stands to reason that a lot of people buy the tin of cookies and toss the contents to have room for all the sewing impedimenta that's been inhabiting the junk drawer for so long. They need the room for more dead batteries and the remote to some long-broken appliance.
But if you like tin boxes, say hi to Yvette Dardenne, a woman from Belgium who has rounded up 60,000 tins in a collecting career lasting thirty years.
Tins? She's got 'em! Former canisters of chocolates, toffees, coffee, rice, tobacco, talc and shoe polish, from all over the world!
Ms Dardenne is 83, and she needs four houses to hold all her stuff. The whole thing started when she came into possession of a Cote d'Or chocolate box replete with a painting of a blonde girl wearing a blue hat. She keeps that one in the medieval waterfall that stands next to her house.
And, as so often happens with collectors, one tin became a dozen, and then hundreds of dozens, and, next thing you know, there you are with 60,000 of them!
"I haven't been anywhere. I was not travelling. People still think I have travelled a lot. It quickly became known (that I collected boxes). Sometimes, right after my husband left for the office, someone would show up to offer me something," said Dardenne, a resident of Grand-Hallet in Belgium's Liege province.
Lithography is the process of applying a picture or image to a hard surface through chemical reactions. Those who know such things believe that the first lithographed tin box dates to 1868 and features a logo of two horses, the symbol of the biscuits (cookies) made by Huntley & Palmers of Reading, England.
Guess who owns that treasure?
What's more, Ms Dardenne's collection may be viewed by anyone, provided they ask for an appointment.
It would be very nice to bring her a new addition to the collection. How about this oatmeal tin from 1991?
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