When I was a boy, Mom and Dad would come home from the grocery store and unloaded the brown paper sacks of groceries. If we saw anything wrapped in butcher paper, we knew we were in for treat. That meant Dad was either going to barbecue or better yet, they had visited the lunch meat counter and brought home a bunch of fresh sliced lunch meat.

But if we pulled out a long brown paper bread sack, we knew immediately that Mom and Dad had gone to one of the Jewish Delicatessens and inside was a fresh loaf of sliced Jewish rye. And that meant that somewhere there was a package wrapped in a slightly different color butcher paper. And inside that package was either fresh sliced corned beef or pastrami. We knew by the wrapper what it was.

It's the same this time of year and any time we give a gif…