Automotive Accessories: Scraper of a Lifetime

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– Posted on February 22, 2017

Today is our 20th wedding anniversary, and today this automotive accessory is also 20 years old.

When you’re of the marrying age you tend to go to a lot of weddings for friends and family. I forget how many weddings I attended with my wife in the two years we were dating, but it was a lot, and the ceramic mint box at one that inspired me to try for a useful wedding favour.
Speaking of boxes, I had also decided that my girlfriend checked all the right boxes (and vice versa) so we became engaged in Sept 1996. We were both employed adults so there was no real reason to wait a full year and we set a date in February.

If you’ve never been married in February it is great from an organizational standpoint. Every hall is available, all your guests have no prior commitments and can attend.  Best of all, you can go to a tropical destination for your honeymoon (and subsequent anniversaries).

Costa Rica 1997 – How Young We Were

 

Not that I actually did a lot of organizing, I’ll admit here that I pretty much did the minimum and was late for the rehearsal because I was looking at motorcycles.  (Yes, I’m still sorry.)  However, I did nail the wedding favour.  Back when I was single I’d lived in Blenheim Ontario, home of the Mallory window scraper factory.

Since we were getting married in winter I put two and two together, and bought a hundred or so Mallory scrapers from Canadian Tire for two bucks each.  I wasn’t done, because they didn’t look very festive so I printed up a bunch of stickers with our names and the date, and we put little bows on them of streamer material, and curled the ends over a scissor blade.  Very nice indeed.

Our wedding day was cold but clear, everyone enjoyed their scrapers but luckily nobody needed them right away.  Even Oma liked hers, despite the fact that she had never learned to drive, and when she passed away ten years later we inherited her scraper, still unused with the little bow intact.

Oma’s scraper – No longer in the scraper museum

 

All the other scrapers did not have such an easy life, our own are getting worn but still doing the job.  Occasionally we hear from someone who attended our wedding, dropping us a line to let us know that they still have the scraper and that it reminds them of us.

There is some sort of parallel here between marriages and window scrapers.  If you have good tools and try to do a good job you’ll usually get a good result, whether you’re cleaning frost off a window or building a life together.

Thanks for 20 great years of scraping together my dear, Happy Anniversary.