When I got home last night, I found a large box from HSN (the tv shopping channel) Home Furnishings. My first reaction was a momentary panic - now that I'm 46, am I experiencing black outs in which I shop? Then my brother reminded me of a conversation I'd had with our mother.

Mom - "I ordered each of you a bread box. Now you can keep your bread out on the counter and Hanna won't be able to get it."

This statement, of course, pre-supposes that (1) I want to keep my bread on the counter, (2) that I have room on my counter for a bread box, (for those of you wondering, they are surprisingly big) and (3) that Hanna won't be able to figure out how to open the bread box given the potential reward inside.

As it turns out, all of the above suppositions are false. But in the bigger picture, mom sending this box is a bad sign. My mother's only interests are playing slot machines at Pechanga and shopping, and Mom definitely goes for quantity over quality. Instead of buying one $200 present, she will always opt for buying 20 $10 dollar gifts. So, while you have lots of gifts to open at Xmas, it's unlikely that any are worth keeping. (Last year the emphasis was on what she described as "gourmet food", such as curry flavored salt, and a bottle of spinach dip seasoning. The problem is that by the time these things are shipped to a discount store - her store of choice - they have been on shelves elsewhere for years, and have lost all flavor or have gone bad. The same goes for the bath products she buys.)

So an alarm sounded when she asked me last week if I "still collected tea pots". I never collected tea pots. But a few years ago she went through a phase of buying me tea pots as birthday and Xmas gifts. There is nothing wrong with collecting tea pots; in fact, I can easily imagine doing this. Finding beautifully hand painted ceramics, or pots in interesting architectural shapes . . . what I actually got, however, was a tea pot shaped like a cat wearing an apron. We have very different tastes - my mother's runs to cutesy country; mine runs to anything but cutesy country.

So the question remains, what to do with the bread box? Maybe I'll wrap it up and re-gift it as a Mother's Day present.