The holiday season is about to kick into high gear.  This year we’ve got Hanukkah and Christmas on the same day, followed a week later by New Year’s Eve. 

That’s a lot of celebrating, eating and drinking interspersed with gift giving, gift receiving and gift returning. There will be family time and family fights, togetherness and awkwardness, and semi-intrusive questions like who’s Davis dating and did Leo decide where he’s going to college yet. 

If you’re lucky, a relative will bring a new romantic prospect with a weird personality quirk or food allergy, and you and your cool cousins can text each other about the random new guest right then and there, live, during the festivities. That’s the gift that keeps on giving. 

For the eight nights of Hanukkah, I’d like to gift you eight things/random thoughts. And to close out 2024, I’d like to end with a bang. 

No. 1: This year we learned more about the dangers of those black plastic spoons we use for cooking, mostly on nonstick pans to avoid scratches. The plastic contains toxins, and it turns out the nonstick coating on those pans is also killing us. 

Flashback to the 1900s, when I was in my 20s and often made boxed mac and cheese for dinner in a nonstick pan using a black plastic spoon. Single, lazy and not wanting to dirty a dish, I probably (definitely) ate the boxed mac and cheese straight out of the nonstick pan with the black plastic spoon as the vessel. 

How disgustingly delicious that high calorie, unhealthy, processed food was in all of its orange, fluorescent glory. 

Recent news tells us the pan and spoon were the worst offense, and the mac and cheese might have been the healthiest part of that scenario. Who knew?

No. 2: With online shopping there is an option to sort items as you wish, including by price. One choice is “from high to low.” There is no way anybody on Earth ever chooses this option. Nobody wants to see the highest-priced items they cannot afford and then scroll allllll the way down to the end to see the stuff they actually can get. “From high to low” needs to go bye-bye.

Nos. 3, 4 & 5: And now, some comebacks for you to use when the opportunity strikes. 

When someone says, “You look mean,” you can reply: “Well, then don’t look at me.”

When someone at your home thinks your Wi-Fi sucks and they say, “Your internet is unstable,” you can reply, “You should see my life.”

When someone says, “You have a good personality,” you can reply, “Thanks, I have like three more.”

No. 6: I used to dress my kids alike. Sometimes it was so I could spot them in a crowd. Other times I was hoping someone would buy them in a two-for-one deal.

No. 7: Remember the 1970s hit show “Mork & Mindy”? The main character was Mork, from the planet Ork, played by Robin Williams. His catchphrase was an Orkian word, “Shazbat.” Similar to shalom and aloha being used in multiple ways, shazbat was a multipurpose word uttered in excitement, surprise or confusion. 

The writers missed a huge opportunity not making the character of Mork from Ork Jewish. Every Sabbath, Mork could have said “Shazbat Shalom!” Robin Williams was not Jewish. One of the show’s creators, Joe Glauberg, was raised Jewish, but during his time in Hollywood converted to Christianity. This could explain why my brilliant tagline never happened. 

Shazbat.

No. 8: Finally, a deep thought for you to carry with you into 2025: 

A picture is a worth a thousand words. A middle finger is worth just a couple choice ones.

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