World & History · A Decembers list
The prices you still carry in your head
You can't remember your own phone number some days, but you know exactly what a gallon of gas ran the summer you got your license. Twenty-nine cents. You watched the numbers roll.
This is the list for those prices — one line each. What it cost, roughly when, and what that had to do with what you earned.
Free to start. Private from the first word.
Where this list lives
This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.
Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.
- Lists
- A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
- Timeline
- Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
- Inner Circle
- Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
Begin with one list. The rest follows.
One line is enough
Say the price of a candy bar the year you were ten, and the whole corner store comes back — the bell on the door, the coins warm in your fist, the man who ran it.
Nobody writes down what things cost, because at the time it's just the price. It's what you hand over and forget. But a price is a fingerprint of a whole year — what you earned, what you went without, whether you felt flush or scraped thin. The government keeps inflation tables, and they tell you nothing about standing at the counter deciding whether you could afford both.
A book about the old days would strain for the big picture and lose the counter, the coins, the exact figure. A list does the opposite. One line — gas at twenty-nine cents, rent at ninety dollars a month, a Coke for a nickel — and the year rebuilds itself around that number. You write these one at a time, whenever one surfaces, and after a while you're holding a plain account of what a dollar actually bought while you were spending it.
How it works
- 01
Pick this list
It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.
- 02
Fill in what comes
A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.
- 03
Invite who was there
They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.
- 04
Share it, or don’t
One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.
The prices that come up most
The everyday ones
Gas, milk, bread, a pack of cigarettes, a cup of coffee, the Sunday paper. The prices you paid so often you never forgot them, and that moved so much you can date a memory by which figure was on the sign.
The big ones
The first car, the first house, a wedding, a hospital bill, a year of college tuition. The numbers that felt enormous at the time and now sound like a misprint. Write down what you paid and what you were making, because the second number is what makes the first one mean something.
The ones that stuck for no reason
A movie ticket, a burger and shake, a comic book, a ballgame with a hot dog and a program. Small purchases that lodged in your memory because of the day they belonged to. You remember the price because you remember who you were with.
Decade by decade
- 1950s
- A gallon of gas around a quarter, a loaf of bread under twenty cents, a new Chevrolet for less than two thousand dollars off the lot.
- 1960s
- A first-class stamp was a nickel most of the decade, a movie ran well under a dollar, and a Coke from the machine cost a dime.
- 1970s
- Gas doubled and doubled again after the lines of '73, and a starter house in a good town still ran in the low thirties.
- 1980s
- Interest on a mortgage hit double digits, a compact car crossed ten thousand dollars, and a movie ticket climbed past four.
- 1990s
- A gallon of gas hovered near a dollar, a cell phone or a home computer cost more than a month's rent, and a stamp reached a quarter.
- 2000s
- Gas broke three dollars and then four, tuition outran every wage, and the prices you grew up with started sounding like tall tales.
Other lists you may like
Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.
Begin
A plain ledger of what a dollar bought while you were spending it
Start with the one price you'll never forget — the gas, the first house, the nickel Coke. Put down the number and the year, and the rest will start coming back.