Was it cold where you grew up and did you sleep under heavy quilts to stay warm?

Question

I visited a friends grandparents when i was ten. In January with only fireplace heat we slept in a featherbed under several heavy quilts.
Did you have a similar experience?

These stories open our eyes to the heart of man. Each of us carry an array of impressions that could benefit a listener. Thank you for sharing.

Answer 1

at Grandma's, on the farm, we kids slept in a rope bed, on feather mattresses... and we were covered up with , first a lovely hand-made quilt and then on top of that, as many old feather beds as were handy.... flattened, they made covers that were so heavy, that once you were in bed and Grandma covered you up, you couldn't roll over at all cuz of the weight!!... oh, what a good sleep!!!...

we always took a glass of water to bed with us... if in the morning it was frozen solid, we knew to hurry downstairs to the fireplace!!!.....

Answer 2

I grew up in my grandparents' old farmhouse in northern Indiana. There was no heat in the upstairs and downstairs there was a tiny stove in the kitchen and a baseburner in the living room for heat. This house had absolutely no insulation.
My grandmother heated a brick on the baseburner and at bedtime wrapped it in flannel and sent it off to warm my feet (for about an hour). I slept under a mountain of handmade quilts and comforters. Oh yes, I remember it well!

Answer 3

We had central heat, but my tight-a$$ed mother kept the heat at 50 F at night and 55 when we were home and up. I can still remember - every night at 7:00 she would walk over and turn the thermostat down to 50 - like 55 was warm !! We all had heavy flannel pajamas, a bathrobe and still had to sit with a blanket wrapped around us. Most of the time I was in bed within an hour, because the house would cool off even more than it already was ! Then in the morning she wouldn't turn it up because we would be leaving for school soon. She usually turned it up around 3 - we got home around 3:30.

I bet she doesn't do that now - she's living high on the hog - on all the Social Security and VA benefits she got for us kids when Daddy died when I was 12. God knows she never spent it on us !

I have pictures of me in bed (don't know who took them) under about 6 layers of blankets and quilts.

Answer 4

We moved all over the country when I was growing up. I remember some pretty cold places. My mother and her friend got material from a men's suit making factory and make many quilts. Boy were they scratchy. I guess they were wool, but they were warm. Of course one side was flannel. One of my clearest memories is when there was a heat wave in so. Calif. sometime in the 50s and my dad put all of our mattresses in the back yard. We slept out there under the stars for almost 2 weeks.

Answer 5

How about heat with only a woodstove in the living room, at home, though I don't remember that being cold? However, at a relative's house, with a woodstove in living room and a heavy quilt/curtain over the hallway entrance so that the heat would stay in the main part of the house. A hot water bottle in the foot of the bed to heat it and heavy quilts, then awaking with your eyes unable to open from the cold in them.

Answer 6

We just had a space heater in the living room when I was growing up in Indiana.It was always cold in our bedrooms. We would sleep inside our sleeping bags under a layer of old furniture pads that my Dad had gotten from his friend that had a moving company.Then, when I married my first husband, he was the oldest of 7 children. His parents had a huge house with just a wood stove for heat in the living room. The parents' bedroom, of course, was downstairs and the kids all stayed upstairs with no heat. We spent our fiirst Christmas eve together at his parents' house.Besides sleeping under a ton of quilts, we woke up with a light dusting of snow on us!! There were no storm windows or plastic over the windows, and the blowing snow during the night had come in the cracks around the window. It will be a Christmas eve I won't forget. I felt like I was camping outside!! Merry Christmas!

Answer 7

Yes... I had a living room (as a bedroom) that was an addition to the farm house, the only heat was a fire place... It took forever to heat the room, so I would stand as close as I could to warm my backside up as much as possible then run and jump into my feather bed... I still have feather beds... and the huge feather quilts. Just the best, like sleeping in a cloud! I still have those experiences!!! LOL

Answer 8

When I was a child we lived in Lancing in Sussex. Our house was heated by 1 coal fire in the living room and paraffin heaters everywhere else. We didn't have wall-to-wall carpets either...just linoleum and rag rugs (Nanna used to make them from rags made from old clothes). I remember the floors being SO cold in the wintertime. I had loads of blankets on my bed and a hot-water bottle would be placed just where my feet would go in the bed. Even with all the blankets it would still be bitterly cold especially in the early hours. Sometimes I was allowed to wear a woolly balaclava in bed especially when it was so cold the windows froze over on the inside.
We've told our children and grandchildren tales from when we were kids and the grandsons eyes look like they're going to pop straight out of their liitle faces at the thought of no Tv, no carpets, blankets not duvets and no central heating lol.

Answer 9

I live about 40' or so from the house that I grew up in now. I did have a gas heater in my bedroom, but it was still cold in that bedroom any way even with that heater in there. I had quilts piled on me to keep warm. I was known to sleep with my head under the covers to stay warm as my breath would help keep me warm. I still to this day sleep with my head under the covers if I get cold.

Answer 10

Yes, we slept under quilts and blankets and wore pjs with feet in them in a 2-story house we lived in during my younger yrs. We lived in the WV Mts. and had one of those gas furnaces with a pilot light that always seemed to have to keep being relit. The heat came from a great big square hole that had a metal grate over it. It was right at the bottom of the steps in the middle of the floor and us kids all fell on it and had 'stripes' from the burn at one time or another.---Luvs

Answer 11

Yes. We had a BIG 2 story house that was heated by a BIG coal furnace in the basement (which had a dirt floor). I remember the coal men coming and shoveling in the coal through a basement window. My daddy would go down often and shovel in more coal. Sometimes I'd help him. I remember that smell of coal and how it got on your hands. It heated the house , but I was usually cold and stood over the little square registers and talked on the phone to friends. Sometimes I'd squat down on it. The wallpaper was always worn off from us doing that. An electric blanket would have been a really good Christmas present in those days. I wonder why we never got one .(that I can remember!)LOL...Who knows..maybe we did!!