I recently saw a story going around about a grandmother who wanted to pass on the sets of fancy plates which she inherited from her parents and her children rejecting them as to her children they were just fancy display items in a case near the dinner table but not actually involved with dinner. There’s a lot of commentary on this, but I think apart from whatever side one wants to take it does highlight the problem that fragile things don’t work well as inter-generational traditions.

I learned this myself with some cherished toys from my childhood which my parents had saved for my children. They were called Construx—they’re somewhere inbetween Legos and Erector Sets but was better than either. The problem, though, is that they’re no longer made—they haven’t been for decades—and so they are irreplaceable. The other problem is that they’re delicate, especially now that the plastic is thirty years older and spent that time in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. This might not have been a problem if I’d only had one child, or if I had all of my children as triplets, but with them being more spaced out than that, I couldn’t really give them to an older child to play with without them being accessible to the younger ones, and that would have resulted in breaking quite a few pieces.

So the result is that my children barely played with them.

It’s a pity, but I also don’t see what else I could have done. It would have been very sad to have little children accidentally destroy them, and since they’ve got different personalities than I do they probably wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much as I did, anyway. I’ll probably have more fun pulling them out and playing with them myself after my children are grown.

Fancy dinner plates have the same kind of problem. It’s way too easy to break them by dropping them—sometimes moreso than normal plates because they are often particularly thin—but it’s also way too easy to damage them through simple use. I’ve encountered fancy plates which would easily be scratched by knives and even some whose delicate gilting could be rubbed off by overly vigorous cleaning.

Fancy dinner plates also suffer from the problem of their virtues only being appreciated by generations now gone.

As far as I can tell, fancy plates were a kind of luxury good that became popular among the middle class during the Victorian period, when the newly growing middle class wanted to ape the aristocracy and did so with fancy clothes and fancy plates which were, because of the same economic developments which produced the middle class, now expensive but affordable. Expensive but affordable is a sweet spot as far as signifiers of social status goes. The latter makes them possible and the former keeps them from being so common that they lose all status.

Fancy plates are, of course, pretty in themselves, but they’re actually not great at showing that off since their function is to be covered with food. (Fancy wine glasses do a better job since they can be seen even when filled with wine.) And their function as signifiers of wealth and importance are basically over since economic progress has made similarly pretty things cheap and easily accessible to everyone.

There are things which you can pass onto your children, but if they’re delicate things they need to be replaceable things; things which cannot be broken cannot be used. (There is an exception, of course, for purely decorative things such as paintings, since their use does not put them in jeopardy.) But it’s far more reliable to pass on things which cannot be broken, such as knowledge, skills, and wisdom.

My oldest son ended up reading the Dragonlance Chronicles in different copies than I did, since my omnibus volume had a weak binding and would not easily fit into his backpack to bring to school for reading during free time. It would have been cool if he’d read it from the same physical copy as me, but it’s far more important that he read the same story—which has enabled us to discuss it together.

Ultimately, physical things like plates don’t really last and it’s a mistake to look to them to do so. Sometimes you get lucky and they do, but ultimately things only last when put into a museum and preserved, and not many things are worth of being in a museum. So, pick wisely.