Sara and Melissa Talk About...Grandma Hobbies

We've been running a column series to get more personal with our readers. We are now into our sixth year!

This month, we are talking about grandma hobbies, thanks to this article that inspired us. Some of these hobbies are prominently featured in the novels we enjoy reading.

We're always open to topic suggestions, so please don't hesitate to share those in the comments. We'd also love to know if you can relate to anything we've said or hear your own thoughts on the topic. So don't be shy. :) We look forward to getting to know you as much as we're letting you get to know us. You can find our previous columns here, in case you missed them. 

Sara Steven:

I enjoy crossword puzzles. It’s been my go-to stress reliever since I was a teen. If I have spare time to kill and I don't want to have idle hands (or an idle brain), I’ll whip out a puzzle from the back of magazines or sometimes from an actual puzzle book filled with crosswords, and I go to work.

I do it on planes. I do it when my husband or my kids are watching something on tv that isn’t something I want to watch, or sometimes I’ll do it just because I feel like it. 

I’d come across an article online that highlighted my crossword puzzle obsession as a “grandma” hobby, which intrigued me. What constitutes a grandma hobby? Why has it been labeled as such? And what do they do for you? 

It seems grandma hobbies are old-fashioned, nostalgic quiet hobbies, the type of interests that were more mainstream before the digital age and social media swept into our culture. Things like sewing, quilting, crocheting/knitting, baking, gardening, reading and board games and jigsaw puzzles. And crossword and word searches, respectively. Everything classic is new again, and the same can be said for interests that don’t require a modem, a plug, or a cell phone. 

Other hobbies of mine that fit in this category for me would be gardening. I love gardening. It’s interesting to me that my fifteen years in the midwest didn’t spark any joy in that hobby, but moving out to Arizona, where you’d imagine it would be tough to grow things due to the heat, has really inspired me to try my luck and succeed at it! My husband built a garden box for me at our first home in Arizona, and I was so nervous and worried that I’d be able to keep outdoor plants alive. 

Once I got into the groove of things, we made sure to build another box when we moved to our new home, and things have gone well. 

There are a lot of benefits associated with grandma hobbies, like being a means of relaxation, unwinding, and for me, helping me to break away from the connectivity of social media or electronics. Gardening and crossword puzzles have really helped with my mental health, too. Plus, it’s just plain fun. 

Melissa Amster:

I was looking at the list of grandma hobbies and what resonated with me most was baking. I know reading is also on the list, but if I wasn't doing that, we wouldn't be here right now. In any case, I've been baking ever since I was a kid. My mom and I would bake cookies and cakes together. My late maternal grandma also loved to bake and would bring over delicious cakes when I was growing up. It probably explains why I love the song "What Baking Can Do" from the musical Waitress so much.

In middle school, I took a home economics class during the summer and got all these good recipes, so I would bake them whenever I could. I especially loved this one chocolate chip muffin recipe.

When I was in high school, I'd always bake treats for speech team tournaments. I loved baking Funfetti cookies, which was a recipe using Funfetti cake mix. I would bake one big cookie and put it on a pizza sheet and then cover it in frosting. One of the guys from the team always loved this, so I baked him his own big cookie for his birthday! 

I didn't get a chance to bake often in college because I was living in a dorm, but I would do it sometimes when I got an apartment off campus. It got me started on a tradition of baking chocolate chip cookies for Oscars night, which I upheld for quite a while after college, as well. 

I will admit that a lot of the time, I take shortcuts and keep it simple, just because I've been really busy but still want a treat for dessert on Shabbat. It takes five minutes to bake brownies from a Duncan Hines mix, but they come out SO good every single time! When I do bake from scratch, I go with tried and true recipes that I love, such as s'mores pie or oatmeal cookie bars (from a recipe a friend gave me). I bake pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving every year, as well. That has been a long running tradition! This past weekend, I baked a chocolate pie for Pi day and I love how it turned out!

Pumpkin pie

S'mores pie. Messy but delicious!

One thing I always love baking is challah. It's a lot of work, but so worth it in the end! It's definitely stress relieving to knead and punch the dough. I love how it turns out and receiving compliments on it always makes my day. I put aside a loaf of challah each time to give to a friend or neighbor. I've been doing that for almost 16 years!

Whole wheat challah

I saw that gardening was on the list of hobbies and while that's something I don't have a green thumb for, my husband has been really into it and my daughter has a few plants that she's been nurturing. It's nice that they can bond over that.

What are your grandma hobbies?

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