Repurposing

When I got married I thought long and hard about what types of favors to provide for my guests. I wanted something that was personal, inexpensive and preferably homemade. After a lot of contemplation and debate I settled on the idea of preparing cookie mixes.

I bought a book dedicated to cookie jar recipes, purchased seventy ball jars and set up an assembly line in my kitchen. I chose five different recipes from the cook book and created batches of ten at a time.

I cut out beautiful, white cotton fabric to cover the metal lids and attached instructions on how to prepare the cookies with white ribbon. My husband hand wrote the names of the guests on each jar and included little notes for those guests that were extra special.

Those ball jars were such a pain to transport to the wedding site, that I wondered at the time if I’d made the wrong decision. When I came up with the idea I didn’t realize how much work it would be to carry them. We filled milk crate after milk crate with those heavy jars and literally lugged them to their destination.

When the wedding was over we realized that ten or twelve of our guests had forgotten their favors, so my in-laws gathered up the ones that remained and brought them back to our home. Over the next few months I baked up a couple of batches of cookies and then cleaned the jars and stacked them in our basement.

At first I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with them, but I knew I’d eventually find a use for them.

Now I use them for a whole myriad of purposes including transporting various food products from our primary residence to our beach home. Rather than lugging an entire bottle of juice along for the ride, I usually pour just a portion into the ball jars. They are super easy to transport and nothing ever leaks out of them.

After banishing plastic food containers from our home I brought the rest upstairs and now use them to store nuts and granola.

I love the fact that the jars that stood on the table at our wedding are now a useful part of our routine. In fact, I recently started pouring water into one and using it as my every day glass. Every time I think about those jars and that special day I smile.