The Eclectic Mug Dilemma

What type of person embraces mug uniformity?

Welcome to Small Bites — a place to ruminate on something that may not be fully-fledged out and/or something that doesn’t command a full 1,000 words dedicated to it. A place to inspire some conversation in the comments.

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If you’re not passionate about your favorite mug, you simply don’t have a favorite mug. Through the years, it’s been an ebb and flow for me. All through 2020, I formed an “emotional support”-style relationship with a mug from my local ski area in Michigan, Nubs Nob. Maybe I missed home, maybe I just liked how thick and heavy it was, or maybe all my other mugs were just… fine.

During that time, I found myself drinking more tea than coffee. I don’t have much of an explanation why other than that we had just returned from London and Scotland before lockdown, but that shift in behavior bonded me to that mug even more.

I don’t consider myself to be a collector or hoarder but once I become obsessed with something, I normally dedicate myself to finding the cream of the crop. I began ordering from smaller ceramicists. I started fawning over them in stores. I even took a pottery class with the tacit intent of just possibly emerging from it with a new mug. Without realizing it, my mug collection became “eclectic.”

During a recent AMA on the Sunday Scaries Instagram, someone asked what I thought was a very straightforward question: “Do you have an eclectic mug collection or a uniform one?” My answer was obvious.

However, I soon found that this mug dilemma was a much more polarizing topic than many of the other questions I’d fielded through the years.