This weekend, we played one of my favorite invented games. It’s called “What is this thing, and can I get rid of it?”

This highly entertaining parlor game consists of me, declutterer extraordinaire, going room by room, fishing out all the nonessentials and piling them in a massive teetering stack in the living room. Then I gather the entire family around the detritus to sort, organize and hopefully get rid of these extras.

And there are so many extras. As someone who doesn’t shop for fun and who doesn’t like to hoard anything but books, I examine this clutter like an archeologist. What, exactly, is filling every drawer and bookshelf in my house?

This is what I’ve found. We own a lot of bad hotel pens, mini shampoo bottles, glitter-covered spiral notebooks and toothbrush timers. This tells me that we spend a lot of time staying in hotel rooms (or at least, siphoning off their free wares), digging through prize boxes at school and taking trips to the dentist.

We must, I’ve realized, be a family suckered in by freebies: the water bottles emblazoned with company logos, those silicon wristbands with inspiring messages, the canvas conference bags.

These are the kinds of things each one of us picks up at an expo, thinking we’re being helpful, that surely we need another drink-carrying device, and before we know it, I have 32 refillable water bottles. I am better equipped for hydration than a football team.

In some cases, it’s the disparities that I find fascinating. For instance, the last time I bought silverware was in 2010. Actually, here’s the truth: I didn’t buy it. It was a wedding present that I kept in reserve for 10 years. At the exact moment that all the towels, glassware and dishes we had received fell apart as if on cue, a decade into marriage, I whipped out a shiny new set of silverware. A brilliant strategy.

However, something odd has happened in the ensuing nine years. I now have 25 forks, but only six butter knives. Keep in mind, this started out as a set for 12. If there is war in the silverware drawer, you can see who is winning. At this rate, the knives don’t stand a fighting chance.

Then there are the things I don’t remember accumulating at all — they just Apparated into my house overnight, or perhaps traveled by Floo Powder. In any case, I have never picked up a vase in a store, set it in my cart, paid hard cash and brought it home. Yet I have seven vases. I have tablecloths and Pyrex dishes and pie pans I never purchased, and I guess that’s what I get for hosting the church cookie exchange.

I have three enormous boxes of assorted wires and cables — I’m convinced these reproduce on their own. I have spiral notebooks and binder clips and containers of half-broken crayons and Very Important Screws that look like they might be crucial to some piece of furniture, I’m just not sure which piece. At the bottom of every one of these boxes of assorted junk is a decommissioned Nerf bullet and a blue Lego.

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I am doing this drill every week, and, truth be told, it’s getting a little wearying.

Which is why, when a friend came to visit recently, and gifted us an entire bag of fancy foods, I was thrilled. There were little pots of jam and gourmet salt and local maple syrup and unfiltered honey. It was all deliciously edible. I didn’t have to figure out where to fit it on a wall or in a drawer or how to find room on the bookshelf. No, it will all be happily tucked into our bellies.

In fact, thinking through this, I fell into a sort of fanciful, Hansel-and-Gretel-type daydream, in which my entire house was made of foodstuffs, and the way to declutter was simply to feast on a stew of licorice cables and marshmallow-flavored office supplies. My four enormous boys would make quick work of that type of paring-down. They can declutter a fridge faster than Cookie Monster.

Until the edible household is invented (and I expect Costco to be in the vanguard with that one, preferably dipped in dark chocolate and coated in sea salt), I’ll continue to wage war on the extra piles. Just do me a favor, and don’t hand anyone in my family a free water bottle.

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