household gods

plural noun

1. (in ancient Rome) deities of the home; lares and penates

2. informal,  the essentials of domestic life

Example Sentences

“All those household gods. Who can keep track? Listen, we’ve fallen on hard times, and as I was once brotherly with your uncle, I hope that you’ll find us some room for the night.”

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“The hypothesis has been put forward that these statuettes are cheap mass products, owned by poor people as household gods,” he wrote in the journal Antiquity.

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“All in all, 13 figures of this type do not support the idea that the statuettes were cheap household gods,” he said.

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I asked Sara Georgini, a historian who is series editor for the Papers of John Adams, part of the Adams Papers project at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family, to talk about how presidents used the four-month-long transition period in early America.

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Finally, dessert was a rich, goaty libum, a kind of sacrificial cheesecake the Romans would offer to household gods.

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