Can you show me your umbilical cord stump collection?

I think I'm jumping events a bit here in this new great series, but if I don't write it now the memory will grow cold and stale in my head.

Since I now am the father of a little future Office Lady, considering that little baby Sunshine is genetically 75% Japanese and we have close access and a good relation with the in-laws, I have accepted a lot of Japanese traditions without any complaints. Stuff like visiting the temple and things like that are a pretty nice tradition although we don't really see it from a religious perspective.

But sometimes it can go a bit overboard... Those of you who at some point collected babies probably know that after the umbilical cord has been cut, a small blackened stump remains at the baby's navel. This falls off after a few days. This little stump basically looks like a used snus, blackened and quite disgusting (hey, look at the picture!). When it falls off, my instinct would be to throw it away with the rest of the waste, but not the Japanese, no, they save this little biological waste product for the future.

I've been told that it's not unusual to present it to the child as a gift when they get married or become adults (age 20) as some form of symbolic gesture. The only redeeming thing I can see in this is that it could potentially save me a lot of money since I can just give that and not have to buy expensive shit (like a normal 20-something would demand...). When baby Sunshine was born and her stump dropped off, the in-laws brought out Ms. Sunshine's old waste product to gaze upon its glory (thankfully they had sense enough to indulge in this when I wasn't around, since I would assume it would be something like when they open the chest in the first Indiana Jones movie), but realizing that it had completely disintegrated into nothingness... Too bad.

In the end, I'm ok with keeping it in a box, as long as it's kept away from me and locked so it doesn't crawl up on me during the night...