Good morning! I hope the world is being good to you and you’re being good to it.

Grab your coffee or beverage of choice and share a thought with me!

Mugs are the best souvenir. The venerable coffee mug provides a wonderful canvas capable of displaying diverse designs and colors. When traveling, mugs are our favorite location or experience memento. With a good gift shop mug, every morning coffee can be a fresh journey down memory lane. The desire for having a mug to mark the passage of time and our experiences is infinite. Our cabinet and counter space, however, is not.

Our house currently has a two-door kitchen cabinet with two of its three shelves dedicated to storing mugs. Our coffee maker lives below that cabinet, and it shares counter space with a mug tower and the handful of mugs with no established home. Aesthetically, it’s crowded but not messy, a sort of family kitchen chic. These mugs are featured as the header image in each of these posts, and while we have a plethora of the drinkware, at some point I am going to run out of unique mugs to show. Equally likely, I will forget which mugs I’ve shared and double feature, delaying the inevitable mug famine. (Post authoring note: Spoke it into existence.)

The inherent ridiculousness of this commentary points to a greater need: The Great Mug Purge. One day a year, nostalgic services are suspended and capital mug crime is allowed. At day’s end, we are once again free to purchase new mementos and embrace the warm memories stirred by each cup. The goal: creating capacity so that each mug has a dedicated home and so that its presence is appreciated and not forgotten in the dark recesses of the cupboard. Generic mug from that conference I attended: disposed. Sentimental mug with surgically reattached handle: disposed. Inexplicably not dishwasher safe: disposed. Wife’s mug bearing her favorite team’s logo that is a direct rival to mine: disposed. Once sufficient space is reclaimed, nostalgic services are restored. Thank you for participating in this year’s Great Mug Purge.

It’s tough, since I don’t easily dispose of anything that isn’t obvious garbage, but I acknowledge there is no more room. Consequently, the overcrowding is mostly preventing us from picking up new coffee mugs, and we’ve come across some real doozies that have been hard to leave on the store shelves. I’ve tried getting into magnets and patches, but those don’t spur the same level of sentiment as the mugs. Sure, we typically try find a good Christmas tree ornament to help scratch the souvenir itch, but those only have a limited run during the year; I drink coffee every day. Plus, there’s a degree of pride in being able to use mug after carefully finding the right one and then successfully transporting it home. We have to earn the privilege of using certain mugs just like the mug has to catch our eye in the first place.

Mug overcrowding tis a problem for sure, but it’s something I’m willing to live with. One of these days, I’m sure we’ll rip the band-aid off and thin the herd. Until then, I’m going to enjoy every sip reminiscing about the trip to Custer State Park with our vehicle surrounded by bison, or standing under the waterfalls in Iceland, or walking the Freedom Trail because my wife and I both battled a momentary Fallout 4 obsession. These are mugs with meaning.