I made a 2-year-old cry. I put her cheese stick in her little hand and quickly put the plastic wrapper in the wastebasket under the kitchen sink. The pipsqueak, my great-niece, Lily, began to sob ...

Like many housewives who survived the Great Depression of the dirt thirties, my mother was frugal to a fault. Twenty years later, her single guilty pleasure was the monthly purchase of McCall’s ...