This week, I want to take a moment to discuss a member of your family that no one ever talks about: The basement freezer.
Everyone has a basement freezer. A person can have six full-sized refrigerators in their kitchen, and there’s still a basement freezer. There is no Jewish family whose fridge needs boil down to just one fridge and one freezer. These things are clearly not designed with Yidden in mind. Two shelves for a freezer? Who needs just two shelves? Yom tov alone needs more than two shelves. What if meat goes on sale? Where are you supposed to keep the sodas before the Shabbos seudah so they can land on your foot? Where are you supposed to put the flour when you buy it to make sure nothing’s living in it? What about the 3 open bags of French fries? Or the ten open bags of frozen veggies, including three sizes of broccoli? What about the secret stash of rugelach? And you know how many ice packs the average frum family goes through? You can’t just have them in the cabinet, and when someone gets hurt, you go, “I’m putting an ice pack in the freezer! It should be nice and cold in like 3 hours! Hang in there.” What about all the differently-shaped blocks of chopped meat? What about the half container of non-dairy topping that you don’t remember how old it is? What about the plate with one piece of ice cream cake on it because someone didn’t have room but promised to eat it after their nap? What about the fork that comes with it? And this is all supposed to fit on two shelves?
So you have a basement freezer, which solves a huge part of the problem except for the part that you’re never sure exactly what’s in there.
You maybe know what’s in the front part, but there are items in the back you haven’t seen in years.
“Maybe this food will be good again someday!”
You don’t even know what’s in back of your 2-shelf kitchen freezer that you see every day. Some items are there just to push the things you do use to the front, and there are definitely some kugels back there from Pesach, as well as the last 2 hot-dog buns from every package you’ve bought, and one pita. And when did we buy kreplach?
Occasionally, you will get into your head to check what’s in the basement freezer, and you’re like, “Oh, we do have more chicken cutlets!” and you get all excited. And then you forget about it, until the next time.
You don’t even know what some of these items are. I have a Ziploc bag in my freezer that is either spaghetti squash or riced cauliflower, and we don’t know which. If they were not frozen, they’d be different consistencies and different colors. But if we thaw it to find out, we’ll have to make it into something, and we don’t want to base a supper around this mystery vegetable. So there it remains, getting looked at once a year, a week before Pesach. And we say, “Well, either way it’s not chometz gamur!” and it goes back in.
For the most part, this freezer is full of food you will probably never eat but are also afraid to throw out. It’s there for you Pesachtime, when you need to put all your chometz French fries and frozen veggies out of sight because they spent the year pressed against the various packages of two hot dog buns. It’s also there for you when it’s not Pesachtime, as it’s where you keep the 500 cakes and cookies you made in case you have to unexpectedly throw a sholom zachor or a kiddush. If only Hashem would give some indication of when these simchas might be coming up.
And then before Pesach, you’re like, “We have one week to finish 9 kokosh cakes.”
It’s also where your kids can store snowballs to throw at their friends in the summer.
But for some reason, no one is allowed to see this freezer who doesn’t live in the house. A guest comes for a seudah, and you need, for example, more sorbet, and you say, “Oh, it’s in the basement freezer!” and your guest cheerfully opens the door to the basement and you instantly regret mentioning it. You grab their shoulder.
“Never mind. I’ll get it myself.”
“Why? What’s down there?” they call after you as you head down to the bowels of the house, to the area that you would never subject your guests. Except for their kids, because there’s a playroom down there.
Even you rarely go down to that freezer, except to protect your guests. After cleaning your house like crazy before the guests showed up, the last thing you want them to see are the rooms on the way to the basement freezer. The basement is where you sent all the things you took out of the rooms you cleaned. If they go down, they’ll be like, “They keep their out-of-the-way frozen storage in a room that’s covered in non-frozen storage? That’s crazy! I thought there’d be like a red carpet leading to this freezer.” And you won’t be down there to say, “Sorry, I didn’t get to shove all this stuff into a less convenient storage space.”
But either way, this freezer is an embarrassment. It brings shame upon your family. If people see it, it will be bad for shidduchim.
“What color is that? Avocado?”
It’s never a freezer that you bought new. Probably it was handed down from a relative who was niftar or moved into an assisted-living facility, and it is not new technology.
It has to be defrosted from time to time, they told you. Or else everything gets covered in snow. And your kids get all excited.
Yeah, like I’m going to remember to do that, with a freezer that is always out of sight and never empty. What am I supposed to do with the stuff that’s in there? Should I get a second basement freezer? Who needs to move into an assisted living facility for me to get one?
You might need a second one down there anyway. This freezer is on its last legs always. It could die any day, though you won’t find out for about a week, and either way, you’re never going to get it back up the stairs. It got stuck on the way down the stairs, and the only thing that helped you then was gravity. It’s never coming back up. It’s going to live down there alongside the new one. And then you definitely won’t want to send guests down, so they can open it and go, “Nothing’s in here. Just a smell. Oh, she meant my other left.”
But even if you bought your basement freezer new, it was from the “scratches and dings” section of the appliance store. “That’s okay,” you figured. “No one’s gonna see it.” And now you have to make sure no one sees it. The salesman asked, “What color do you want?” and you said, “It’s not important. The lighting isn’t great down there anyway.”
Nothing is hanging on the door to this freezer, except maybe the number to Hatzalah. Or a sign that says, “Other Freezer.”
You got what you got. Sometimes it also has a fridge, which is mostly full of eggs. But usually it’s just a freezer, top to bottom. Sometimes, it opens on top, like a coffin. You definitely don’t need the guests hesitantly opening that up.
“Did they hit a cow?”
The good thing about the coffin model is that nothing frozen ever falls on you. The bad thing is that the bottom layer of foods will never ever see the light of day. If you thought you never see what’s in the back of an upright freezer… Also, I’ve never had one of these, but where does one stick the number for Hatzalah? On top?
But nobody keeps a coffin freezer in the kitchen, where the guests can see it. It has to live in your creepy basement.
But don’t worry -- it’s not just you who’s embarrassed of their freezer. When you ask neighbors if you can use their freezer, like when you’re making a simcha or your freezer needs to be defrosted, they say, “Let me check if I have room,” because they have no idea what they have down there either. And you say, “I can follow you down with my stuff…” And they say, “No!” And this is the same neighbor that you didn’t let down to your basement.
The thing is, it doesn’t actually have to be in the basement. That’s just the minhag. You can just as easily keep this freezer upstairs. Say, in a bedroom.
It should be in a bedroom! You can keep an ice cube tray in there for drinks! And secret freeze pops! Your kids knock, and you’re like, “Just a minute!” and you wolf down a popsicle and hope to answer their questions before they notice your lips are green.
But you would never send guests up there either. Definitely not once they start commenting on how many sheitel heads are living on top of it.
“Why would they put sheitel heads on top of a chest freezer?”
Magnets!
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.