Every so often, when you open your mailbox you find that favorite day-brightener: an unsolicited package! Usually, of course, it’s from your parents. What could it possibly contain, you wonder. Money? Your favorite home-baked dessert? A gift certificate to Firehouse? No. It’s almost never any of these things, except sometimes the dessert. My freshman year, my parents sent me a care package every week, and by third or fourth week, I had already recuperated all of my forgotten-at-home items and it was clear my parents were running out of ideas. Now I get one or two boxes a term, usually coinciding with a holiday. In a childless vacuum at home, parents turn to the strangest things to fill that flat-rate USPS box, and we, the hapless but unneglected college students, are left thinking, “Do I really have to store this for four more years?” Here’s a list of the most bewildering care package items I (and some of my acquaintances) have received:
- Halloween twinkle lights
- Ghost and bat hanging decorations
- Extremely large seasonal window decals
- Outdated absentee ballot
- Issues of Ladies Home Journal
- Jane Austen action figure
- Pictures of anonymous babies (possibly cousins)
- Forty-four piece racheting flex-head driver set
- Sixty (60) granola bars
- One stiletto heel, shirt covered in Einstein’s portrait, bottle of Tabasco (all in one box)
- Matching red sweaters with sister for Valentine’s Day
- Grow-A-Date: The Incredible Expanding Date That Grows in Water
- Note that says “I meant to send you a care package, but I never got around to it.”
- Box of Annie’s Mac’n’Cheese with Post-It on top that says “mmm, carbs!”
This article has been reprinted with permission of the author, Anne Czernek, from the Carl. The Carl is the Carletonian's biweekly arts and literature supplement.