Family Time Capsules
“I am giving you a gift that I want you to fill with memories. Then, one day years in the future, I want you to destroy it.” Those are the instructions for the time capsule I have given family and friends.
Unlike a traditional time capsule that you bury in the ground or under a building to dig up decades in the future, this is one that you add to year over year. I have designed a one-way mail slot where you can put in memories that, year over year, will build up and one day long in the future you will need to cut open destroying my delicate joinery.
The stack of memories are is in chronological order as you add them one at a time. In our family we put in our annual Christmas letters, and notes we write on birthdays or anniversaries. I put in the eulogy I gave for my dad. Every New Year’s Eve we do predictions with some friends. Those go in there as well.
The boxes are always finely made, always made of wood, sometimes some veneer, and assembled with rabbets, mitres, dadoes, half lap joints or whatever draws my fancy. I like to make them with contrasting woods to show off the shape as well as openings and gaps so you can see the memories stack up and become an archive of your family.
For some of the more recent ones for weddings or new babies I have included writing prompts (best memory of your fiancee, how did they propose, What are you looking forward to most… What is the child’s name, boy or girl?) so there is a starting point.
This is the kind of thing I wish I could commercialize. But making them one at a time in my home shop takes hours. Most of that is on me. I can’t just slap together a wooden box and nail it together. The process and results are important to me. The last one I made with veneered wood took over 10 hours with probably $50 in material. At my “shop rate” of 150 an hour I don’t think it is worth $1550. Maybe if I had a full shop with a table saw, lots of clamps and a router table I could make them in an hour or so. Then maybe charging $150 would make sense. Until then I’ll keep making them one at a time.
I don’t know when we will cut ours open. Maybe my daughter’s wedding. Maybe my retirement. Maybe never. I’ll leave it to my daughter to cut open after she has added a few years of her own memories. On that day someone will take my Bad Axe Bayonet 14” carcass saw and hack it open destroying hours of work to get and the contents inside.
Just as I intended.