This past week, my Eldest Son and his fiancé came to visit for a day. There were a few errands I had to run the morning of the day they were heading back home and I wanted to spend as much time as possible with them, so I invited them along. It was fun!
I’ve done this before with relatives, sharing errand-running time with them. I didn’t know there was a term for this until I read a tweet by Cindy Wang Brandt (@cindywangbrandt) recently. It’s called “errand hanging.”
Cindy indicates that errand hanging is not really a thing in American culture, but that’s not the case everywhere. But it should be a thing in American culture. We’d get the benefit of helping each other get things done and enjoy ourselves doing it. Plus, some errands are difficult to accomplish on our own, so errand hanging would give us the assistance we need.
When I mentioned this blog post to Daughter a moment ago and explained errand hanging to her, she said she’d like to do chore swapping with friends because it’s more fun to clean other people’s houses and it would give people a chance to socialize while doing chores. I’d be down with that, too!
Errand hanging and chore swapping … let’s do this, America!