Fridge central

February 26, 2009 - 7:14 PM by Jessica

According to a recent survey interviewing 330 participants, 88% of Israelis post some form of information on the fronts of their refrigerators, ranging from notes to themselves, Israeli flags, kids’ test scores, cartoons, and, most importantly to Golden Pages, a local publisher of magnetic directories and the survey conductor, advertisements of some kind.

fridge-front It’s fascinating, really, as there’s much one can glean from the stuff stuck to another person’s fridge. My fridge front, for instance, has changed drastically in the last four years of my life. When I was still a swinging single, my fridge was carefully designed with pictures of my friends and family, neatly arranged in magnetic frames on the upper half of the fridge. When I married Daniel and became stepmother to Amira and Aiden, I really had to change my fridge front tendencies, and our fridge now includes their pics, my pics and our joint pics — including several ancient photos of the girls in their gan classes and the butchers at the SuperDeal formerly known as Falcon — their collection of decorative magnets, class lists, art from over the years, a list of metric exchanges used for cooking, and ads for only the places that we call the most, i.e. the pizzeria, cab company, electrician, dentist and a few choice others.

It seems that those magnetic ads we post lump us with 96% of the survey respondents who said they posted some form of service advertisements, and 61% who actually use said ads.

When we moved apartments and did a renovation on our new place, which included redoing the kitchen, we toyed with the idea of putting in a stainless steel fridge. The thing was, we wouldn’t have been able to put magnets on said refrigerator. I was excited about the idea; loving the thought of a pristinely clean, naked fridge. But the girls were aghast at the idea; “How would we find the important phone numbers?” asked Amira. “Where we would put my kindergarten picture?” said Aiden. (Mind you, she was nine at the time.) But, traditions prevail and a new house was change enough. We went for a traditional fridge, albeit with freezer on the bottom, and did a purge of the fridge paraphernalia, including the magnetic numbers and letters that the girlz hadn’t played with in years.

So the fridge front is still covered, and at times I have to resist just throwing it all out. But i can’t; for starters, I’d be excommunicated. And it would take that much longer to find the phone number for Burgers Bar. And so, the fridge remains in its catch-all magnet stage, but at least I have a place to list the babies’ chart of dirty diapers…

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