But twice a year

My mother died six weeks before our son, our first child, was born (and he was two weeks late). She lived alone, by that time in her life, in a dilapidated, rambling old five bedroom farmhouse with huge rooms and huge pieces of furniture. We lived in a tiny two bedroom terraced cottage. Everything had to be sorted out and settled with undue haste. Almost every piece of furniture from the house went to auction, but somehow (we can't remember how) we found room for some pine tables and this chest

I remember the valuer telling us that this is a 'mule chest', but I mis-remembered the reason it has this name. 'Mule chest', I now realise, refers to the design: hinged lid, two or three drawers, lock and key. From the front, ours looks very similar to the first one in the link, though the wood is much darker, possibly mahogany. Our fittings are workday iron, not brass. My false memory is that I thought the 'mule' descriptor referred to the fact that the front panel had been turned. The picture shows decorative carving on the inside of the chest front, matching that on the outside of the sides. This was a response to fashion: at some stage in history, someone has turned the front around and carved three plain panels into the new outside, replacing the outmoded fancy carving with a simpler design

In my childhood, the chest held starched sheets and coarse woollen blankets: the 'bedclothes' for our feather-matress beds (on which the matresses needed turning daily!) and was opened several times each week. With us, it holds Christmas: tree decorations, twinkly lights, reds, greens and golds, so it is opened twice a year. This is just as well, as it it in some state of disrepair. We needed to move it today, but I did not dare do that until I found ways to improve it's rigidity a bit; not with "old clout nails" I'm afraid, just some strategically placed brass screws. Good enough for biannual opening