Friday Favorite Flea Finds: November 28, 2025
This week’s F4 features a serendipitous stumble upon vintage thermoses with plenty of warm memories to share.
Thanksgiving week is all about family, food, and, if you’re lucky, vintage finds hiding in plain sight. My sisters have flown in from across the miles to spend the holiday with the other Texas sister and me, and while none of us expected to stumble upon collectibles, the Airbnb they rented in Greenville turned out to have a treasure trove of its own.
Vintage games in an old pastry safe, an awesome collection of first edition Nancy Drew mysteries, and plenty of furniture items that are fun to look at but dangerous to sit on. But the true treasures were hiding in the kitchen. There, lining the top shelves, sits a gleaming parade of mid-century thermoses, featuring all of the cool period reds and blues, and the unmistakable forest green of a classic Coleman jug. The owner, it turns out, has been curating her collection for years, mixing family hand-me-downs with flea-market scores that caught her eye. If they could speak, I'm sure they would have plenty of stories to tell about long-ago picnics, roadside stops, and school-day lunches.
In my mind, there is something enchanting about finding warmth in the collection of a stranger. As my siblings and I sit and drink coffee and trade childhood stories and laughter this morning after Thanksgiving, these colorful thermoses remind me that the best collections, like family gatherings, offer comfort and connection to the past, and in the case of my sisters and me, a dash of vintage charm that takes us straight back to our grade school lunch table.
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