What we call “granny hobbies” aren’t actually granny hobbies
If you love wholesome crafts, it’s not necessarily a grandmother’s life you’re drawn to, but a domestic one
I’ve seen a lot of millennials and zoomers celebrating the fact that they’re choosing “granny hobbies” to escape from the wild pace of modern life and I absolutely love to see it.
I, too, find enormous gratification and satisfaction in creating things with my hands from fiber, dirt, or that glorious combination of flour, water, salt, and yeast that can bring so much joy into one’s daily life in the form of fresh, homemade bread.
However, I do have a bone to pick with the fact that we view these things as merely “hobbies” that best suited for the easier, slower pace of later life.
For one, the only reason we tend to associate these time-honored skills with grandmothers in our modern culture is that people who are older than us learned these skills when they were young…back when most young people learned these things.
If you are embracing granny hobbies, you are not resigning yourself to an elderly style of life, but a more domestic one.
And I think it’s no coincidence that many women are embracing these marks of a simpler, more wholesome, more self-reliant lifestyle after being raised in the wreckage of the sexual revoluton and rise of the globalist corporatocracy.
Up until around the middle of the twentieth century at least, sewing, baking, gardening, etc. were skills that the average woman would have known by default as a means of survival or basic daily industry.
So, it wasn’t very long ago in the grand scheme of world history for a woman in her teens, 20s, and 30s to not only be skilled in these areas but to rely on them for basic everyday needs as a given. Not just grannies.
To our grandmothers, the things we now call “granny hobbies” were just a normal part of a woman’s adult life before the prevailing culture’s attitude towards the domestic arts and femininity shifted so drastically.
This contributed to her own ability to care for herself as well as contribute to a household or the type of business that could reasonably be expected to function well by primarily hiring women over men. (Remember, before second wave feminism the division of labor between the sexes was generally a given because of basic common sense, not deliberately manufactured wicked patriarchy).
Even before industrialization, women in middle and upper classes with a host of servants to tend to their basic daily needs would study craft, gardening, or even help servants in the kitchen (as pseudo-gentry Jane Austen and her mother and sisters would).
Meanwhile, a host of people worldwide to this day still either rely on “granny hobbies” for basic survival or as a matter of choice as a reflection of their values and attitude towards modernity (*cough* hiiiii that’s me).
Much in the same way that “trad” is not simply an empty, superficial trend but rather something with an esthetic and popular lifestyle choices that reflect deeply-held and meaningful values, the growing popularity of slow, wholesome “granny hobbies” is no doubt a reaction to a hyper-digitized and unwholesome world that has rendered more than one generation fraught with anxiety, depression, cynicism, and existential dread.
So don’t get me wrong.
As someone who ultimately came to the Lord and found meaning and freedom in the significance and meaning of homemaking over fifteen years ago, I’m delighted to see so many women embrace the time-honored crafts we now dub “granny hobbies.”
As part of my passionate effort to re-normalize the sacred art of homemaking, I couldn’t be happier to see others discover the joy and fulfillment of working with the fruit of God’s earth with our own bare hands to beautify, nourish, and steward our relationships and environments.
But let’s not call them “granny hobbies.”
They’re not just hobbies, but by-design skills that connect us to our human heritage as well as reflect the image stamped upon our creature of an amazing Creator God.
It really kills be that these handicrafts died out so recently. Just 2-3 generations ago these were normal skills that they did out of necessity, not just for fun! I’m having to watch YouTube videos to figure out all of these skills when I wish so badly I had had them passed down to me.
I Love thIS reorientation, or rather REMINDER, sooooooo much. Thank you, thank you, thank you Isa!!