As a real-and-truly grown up, I have a subscription to Country Living Magazine and I love it. It is a beautiful magazine and I love it’s fresh take on country style, and my generation’s version of this classic decorating scheme. But you know what else I love? The old Country Livings. I’m talking at least 20 years old, or close to 30. Let’s talk about this….surely I’m not the only one?
I’m a notorious Antique Mall magazine hunter. You can usually get an old magazine for 50 cents or a dollar. So you can get a good stack of lazy lunchtime reading for the cost of one current volume. I always keep an eye out for Mary Englebreit’s Home Companion, Early American Life and of course, Country Living.
The old-school Country Livings are practically another magazine, with it’s focus on more rustic and colonial Country style, and it has a lot more articles that are like short stories and how-tos on old timey skills. They are also full of women in denim jumper dresses with Dorothy Hamill haircuts, cigarette ads, and porcelain dolls available in just four easy payments. But something about them is so…comforting. It’s like a time capsule back into my childhood where I would sit in the dining room floor and play with my mom’s faceless Amish rag dolls while Dallas played on the living room TV.
I am also really drawn to the Early American style of decorating. The salt box houses. The huge fireplaces and the stories about how normal people scrimped and saved and bought their dream home— a nearly broken down 200 year old shack in a field usually, that they slowly brought back to it’s old timey glory. Because I don’t know about you….but I am sick to death of reading about rich New York City hipsters who up and leave the city and purchase a fairytale farmhouse in Vermont where they raise their equally hip children, Pinecone and Periwinkle. But I digress 😉
Other than being drawn to the more rustic style, I am also drawn to how much it feels like home and childhood, but the best parts. There is no talk of recession. There is no talk of the latest thing for a mother to be afraid to feed or give her children or feel guilty about doing/being/not living up to. Sure, they covertly (or not so covertly) try to pursued me that cigarettes are chic, but the lady promoting this is wearing a 1980s business suit and using an awful lot of aqua-net, so what does she know?
But over all they take me back to living at our little house on Shadow Lane when my mom went to Longaberger Basket house parties, summer was lovely and lasted forever, Santa Claus came every Christmas, and I wrote Little House on the Prairie style stories in reams of notebooks (completed with bonneted illustrations) and all was well in the world.
So there you have it. That’s my, perhaps odd, infatuation with old Country Living magazines. Do you have a favorite little something that transports you back to childhood? Or do you also have a love for a more rustic/primitive country style? I’d love to hear about it 🙂
Well, I think I’d better get this day started! Hope you have a good one as well~
~H
Sleightholm Folk Art 
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