Old And New: Vintage Finds For The New Year

Happy New Year! Happy 2012 and all that! I have a few vintage finds with a New Year's theme, leading off with:

I got this postcard at an estate sale for very little. It's postmarked 1913. On the back is merely a "From Grandma & Grandpa Pella" (I assume they mean Pella, Iowa). It was delivered to someone in Chicago. 

One perk of buying books secondhand is the occasional forgotten bookmark - any flat item left in the book and found by the buyer later on. Sometimes they're actually bookmarks (I've gotten some nice ones this way), but one such purchase had this within its pages:

On the back the sender appeared to have written a greeting in German to send to someone in the Netherlands. The message is dated 12-26-58.

(As an aside, I got the term "forgotten bookmark" from a blog of the same name. You can view it HERE. It's an entertaining read. The man is a used bookseller who shows off what he found in the books that come to his shop. Old postcards appear to be a common "bookmark", but I still got a kick out of finding the one above. It was an added bonus to my book purchase!)


Another vintage New Year's find was this:

This is a hand-embroidered guest towel; purchased for 25c December 2010. It stood out in the abundant sea of thrift store Christmas stuff that month; don't think I'd ever seen an embroidered item that featured a New Year's theme before. 


Also from December 2010 came this 99c purchase at the Salvation Army thrift store:

The box holds two unopened packages of 25 paper cocktail napkins. Would be fun to use at a New Year's Eve party - if I was the type who threw such parties! But instead we devoured our sushi and watched the performers on TV. That was fine with me!