I don't have any elves helping me

Growing up I always liked the story of the shoemaker's elves that helped him magically get everything accomplished.

I have come to the realization that I don't have any!

(And if I did have any elf friends I am guessing they would be more like Ellie the Elf from the song my sister did a dance to when we were little. She was full of mischief...which sounds more like what I would have "helping" me!!)

Here is what gave me the clue:

My hubby and I went to a birthday party for my boss' wife sometime over the summer and I, being the sister of "captian planet" and the official "go green cheerleader" of the office, took home the bottles from the evening with me to recycle.

However, I never wanted to just throw them in the glass container at the local recycling drop off. I think these bottles are adorable and I want to use them for something. So instead I have my husband unload them from my car (where they had been for awhile) and put them in the garage...until I could get around to cleaning them and finding a place to store them until I decided what I wanted to do with them.

So there they sat, collecting dust and taking up space in our already overly stuffed garage until my hubby declared that I needed to do something with these bottles or he was going to throw them all in the trash! I promptly moved them from the garage ("his space") to the kitchen counter "my space" so that I would remember to wash them one evening when I got home from work.

However, in all the hustle and bustle of planning, packing and then leaving, this never got accomplished. So for the long wonderful vacation, and a couple weeks after we got back, there the dirty, smelly, dusty bottles sat on my kitchen counter. That is until last weekend, when I was in super-woman mode, I stuffed them (like a specialist) into our dishwasher and got them all cleaned & sanitized & ready for the next step. (Also hubby had declared again he was taking them out to the trash if something wasn't done since he had needed kitchen counter space earlier in the week to prepare something to eat and it wasn't avaiable to him with all those bottles taking up the preciouse counter space real estate in our kitchen!) After carefully pulling them back out of the dishwasher (which at one point I wondered if this step was ever going to be accomplished I had stuffed them so well inside, I thought I might have a stuck-closed dishwasher with fantastic, tall and clean bottles inside of it forever) I sat them all back out on the counter to finish drying.

Exactly where they had been for over a month.

Which is where they now still sit.

Waiting patiently for a new home.

Now the question is what should I do with them? (Before hubby dares to threaten the trash again-I must find a good solution for these wonderful bottles or I fear the worst for them!!) I am sure they would make some sort of perfect gift, if I could just figure out what to put in them I would be set for Christmas!! (Plus I will really need to find a place to store them until Christmas where they won't be in the way-that is the really hard part!!)