Actually, they’ll probably meet sometime during the summer first. But this definitely won’t happen in your lifetime, especially if you show up without Chanukah presents.
Maybe you should just go to the stores when you can. Stores have regular sales every week, and things are not that much more expensive. It’s better than waiting in really long lines to get into stores to wait in more really long lines and get into fistfights to save a couple of dollars.
“No. I wouldn’t be working then anyway. It’s 3 in the morning.”
But the truth is that you have plenty of stuff around your house that you keep accumulating more and more of, but is absolutely useless. Even if one or two of something is useful, you’re never going to use fifty thousand of them. But just because these things are useless to you doesn’t mean you can’t give them to your friends and family. For example, you can give out a nice assortment of hotel soaps.
There are other options too. Just tastefully arrange a collection of any one of these things in one of the ever-growing number of decorative mishloach manos baskets you have accumulating around your house that you can’t re-gift because everyone you know knows exactly who gave out these baskets last year:
Bentchers. You can’t fit enough people in your house to use as many bentchers as you have. What, are you just going to give them out at your next kid’s wedding?
Dreidels. Your kids keep coming home with dreidels, and you only play the game once over the entire course of Chanukah – on the ninth night, right before chassidishe shkiyah.
Reusable cloth bags. Every business gives them out at conventions now, even though – and follow me closely here – all bags are reusable. The only difference is that cloth bags don’t make embarrassing crinkling sounds.
Those little paring knives that you get for free when you watch a demonstration at Kmart.
Vintage magazines.
Chopsticks. Every restaurant gives out chopsticks with their sushi, as if you don’t have any chopsticks at home, and you take them. You might as well, because you just paid well over a dollar a bite for six pre-made bites of fish. Are they actually disposable? But then what are non-disposable chopsticks made out of? Metal? They’re just two barbecue skewers? No one throws out their old chopsticks after they use them. They can’t be any worse than that wooden spoon they give out for bedikas chometz, which reminds me:
That wooden spoon they give out for bedikas chometz.
The big box of single socks. There are plenty of things people can do with your socks, such as use them as cleaning rags or make puppets, and you’re not going to do anything with them, because you’re still holding onto the slim hope that someday their significant others will come home.
Ketchup and soy sauce packets. Also those little jellies they give you in the hospital. Either the jellies are too small or the bread is too big. Who uses so little jelly? Is this in case I want to make one donut?
Calendars from different tzedakkah organizations.
Your kids. You have way too many of these lying around the house, and they’re pretty much useless. All they do is make noise and fight. So why not give them to your loved ones?
Have a question for “You’re Asking Me?” Put it with the others. We’ll find a use for it.
