Need a holiday gift to give? Look around your house

This time the "lost Lenore" is writing a column for the New York Sun about a potential trend: declutter your house for the holidays. Instead of doing Amazon.com to buy gifts for the oompteenhundred people on your Christmas list, chances are you've got a house full of stuff collecting dust that somebody might like. Is this a good, bad, ugly or just REALLY tacky idea? Well, you'll have to wait til the NY SUN runs Lenore's column (after Christmas) to find out, but in the interim, here's my two cents...

Hey, there are people who do this without even being invited. They're called burglars or, to be more 21st century, "home invaders." They'll do the job, take stuff you don't even WANT them to take and kick the crap out of you for good measure. Who says you can't have it all? Seriously, my brother is a trailblazer in this trend, if it is indeed such a trend. Of course, he's always been a trendsetter, for years presenting me with Christmas gifts wrapped in Reynolds wrap, which is actually more expensive I think than most wrapping paper you'd pick up the dollar store, which is where you go to buy gifts for people on your holiday Z list. The de-clutter concept is the natural progression toward society's tendency to REGIFT which might not exactly be Emily Post, but I think is just fine. I mean, maybe you can live without a Dr. Huxtable sweater--you know, one of those garments that looks like someone crossed a sheep with an aurora borealis--but then again, maybe your second cousin would love it. Is this an insult to the person who gave you the woolen rainbow coalition in the first place? Of course not. What's our most treasured commodity these days? No, not Al Gore. And besides gasoline. Yup, you guessed it: TIME. Anything that saves us time fighting the Viking hordes that descend from Capitol One commercials into the malls these days, pillaging the Macy's and raping the Gap, is monumentally appreciated. A dear friend recently sent me a tin of Peppermint bark as a holiday gift. Well, peppermint is my least favorite candy. I mean, the stuff's just 5 grams of sugar removed from medicine. And believe me, my a** doesn't need it. But it's nice, from Crate and Barrel...and I have a party coming up and now I don't have to worry about hitting the liquor store first to buy a bottle of wine for the host. This Peppermint Bark in pleasant red-and-silver container will do nicely. So my friend gave me a gift far more valuable than a tin box of chocolate covered pseudomedicine. TIME (as in ticktock, not the magazine...though a subscription to TIME would be a nice gift...educational dontcha know). And saved me $20 and gas to the liquor store to boot. Happy Holidays!