Settle in. It's Girl Scout Cookie time!
It’s Girl Scout Cookie time!
It’s that time of year when boxes of cookies are airlifted into the workplace by parents of Girl Scouts who have strong-armed every person they know into buying cookies to support the most wholesome and noble institution of girldom. Friendship demands purchase of multiple boxes from multiple people. Rejection of Girl Scout Cookies is like rejecting Jesus Christ himself; both are righteous, pure and nourishing.
We have no Girl Scouts ourselves, but plenty of our friends do. Most awkward is the protocol for buying cookies from multi-Girl Scout households. Brownies are still young enough to cry if older sister manages to finagle an extra box from us, and nobody wants to witness that watery scene. In a world in which disappointment can never occur and everybody gets a participation ribbon, cookie orders must be meted out evenly. Our solution is to order one type from one sister, another type from the other sister. Everybody wins.
Our shelves are stuffed to overflowing with colorful boxes bearing the three-headed logo of wholesomeness. We have cookies sitting in nondescript cardboard containers on the floor. Our neighbors are suggesting us for the next season of Hoarders. But I’m confident we won’t be selected. Want to know why? Because the cases and cases of Trefoils, Tagalongs, Thin Mints, Somoas, Do-Si-Dos, and other delectables that we purchased this year will be gone before St. Patty’s Day. For one simple reason:
I eat them by the sleeve.
I can’t open a box of Girl Scout Cookies without downing half of the contents in a single sitting. My wife knows this. She buys them anyway. And while she’s offloading the cargo container of cookies we purchased into our cupboards, she delivers a stern scolding to me about overindulging and getting fat in the winter—the time of year when tennis matches and bicycles rides are still months away. But here’s the thing. I’m already fat. I lack willpower and I can smell a single sugar molecule at 150 yards. Which do you think is going to have a more powerful effect on me: A haranguing from my wife, or a towering pallet of sweet cookie goodness beckoning me from an arm’s length away?
Suffice it to say I’m not cutting back on my cookie intake unless my girth starts making me a good candidate for a sleep apnea mask—and only then if the mask doesn’t have a slot to shove cookies through.
We once tried rationing all of our Girl Scout Cookies over the course of the year. But here’s the peculiar thing about them. Even though one box tastes as good in February as another does the following October, they don’t taste the same. Nothing tastes as good as anticipation, and that’s the secret ingredient in the cookies crack that the little girls in green peddle every year about this time.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a sleeve to finish.
I was laughing so hard throughout this entire entry that I almost spit my trail mix all over my computer screen! I once felt your pain, but I relocated a year ago and luckily, I don’t have any friends with daughters that are Girl Scouts, so I only get suckered into the cookies when I’m out shopping or running errands. I’m also lucky because I never carry cash, but my boyfriend does and he refuses to buy me more than one box. I only wish that he would buy a box for himself, so he indulge in this fatty goodness with me, thus making him get fatter with me.
Hah, hah! Thanks for your comment, Mona! I feel your pain. Thanks again for visiting!