The Fifty and The Familiar

Theoretically, buzzy and busy places with communal seating like the area's
Fox in the Snow locations will fall off the radar for me soon

My quest to expand my food horizons came relatively late in my life.  I can't do much nowadays about several dozen too many pursuits of Mickey D's Big Mac combo meals and other items I chose for frugality and convenience (but not necessarily taste) in my younger days, but I'm still firmly in "making up for lost time" mode.

However, like someone who's just pulled his fifth beer from the lone six-pack in the fridge, I've realized my time in this mode might be limited. As much as I'd like to be like a Simon Majumdar (who just celebrated his 55th birthday and is still going strong exploring the world and its cuisines), my body has sent signs it's ready to slow down a bit. Big portions, while nice, haven't been mandatory for my culinary pleasure for awhile.  Eventually, the doc will tell me that caffeine from my 1-2 cups of caffeinated coffee must go the way of the dodo bird, and my insides will eventually convince me that capsaicin and all its blazing, sweat-inducing glory isn't a good idea.

Interestingly, a recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Frank Bruni encapsulated this feeling quite well, saying that reaching the age of fifty has changed his perspective on dining.

Age Is But A Number: The Golden Hobby Shop

In the process of making our on-the-whim trip to the 2014 Village Lights holiday event in German Village (please see this post to read about some of the sights we encountered), my spouse had remembered a gift store in the neighborhood that featured arts and crafts of metro area senior citizens that she wouldn't mind visiting if we found their location during our event wanderings. This turned out to be the Golden Hobby Shop, and both my spouse and I ended up quite pleasantly surprised at what we found.

Founded in 1971 in the King-Lincoln neighborhood, this non-profit venture operated as a consignment shop catered toward the sale of handmade arts and crafts created by area senior citizens (currently, anyone who is 50 years of age or older can become a consignor of the shop.) The shop located a decade later to their current location in German Village when they outgrew their original space. With help from the City of Columbus (the shop is currently run through the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department) they took over and helped renovate the Old Third Street School in their current neighborhood to handle their operations. The shop had been threatened with closure by city budget cuts in 2009, but a deal between the shop's board of trustees and the city allowed the shop to operate with a minimal subsidy from the city and a lot of volunteer help.

These crafts, found in the main retail area, were just the tip of the iceberg

When my spouse had visited the shop several years ago, she seemed to remember a fairly select amount of goods for sale on a single level of the property. On this visit, we were surprised to learn, with the help of one of the shop's friendly volunteers, that there were multiple rooms with arts and crafts on two levels of the building. The main space itself would be considered a goodly-sized retail gift store by many standards and contained a cornucopia of items: greeting cards, mounted drawings, doll-sized clothing, assorted home goods and numerous sports-related tchotchkes were just the tip of the iceberg of what we would find during our wanderings here.

As we moved to the other rooms, we found even more items, holiday-related and otherwise, than we could have possibly imagined prior to this visit. These handcrafted products we examined covered all manner of themes, styling and uses. And while the items are all produced by senior members of the community, their appeal and practicality was hardly restricted to older folks.

Another thing that became quite obvious was the affordability of many of the items. While there are items that reach into the triple digits price-wise, we mutually agreed that many of the items offered for sale seemed quite affordable, if not close to a proverbial steal, based on the listed price.

The Golden Hobby Shop is currently open on Tuesdays through Saturdays from 10 AM through 5 PM, with additional Sunday hours from 12 noon to 5:00 PM, now until Christmas Day (they will shutdown afterward until the end of January to perform inventory and space cleaning.) If you are looking for a handcrafted item with a bit of a personal touch for that special someone or someones this holiday season, at a price that may have you do a double-take because it seems like such a bargain, this now 40-plus-year institution of the Columbus is as good a place to start as any.

Golden Hobby Shop
630 South 3rd Street (German Village)
Columbus, OH
(614) 645-8329
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