The chipped serving spoon may know the family better than the wedding silver.

Things that get used are the things that gather a life. The good cutlery stays in its box, protected and therefore absent from every meal that ever mattered, while the battered spoon has been in the middle of forty years of ordinary evenings. Preservation and participation pull in opposite directions. What you keep for best is what your family will have the fewest memories of.

Look at what you are saving for an occasion that keeps not arriving. The dishes, the good bottle, the room nobody sits in. Use one of them this week on an unremarkable day, since that is where the life you actually have is happening.