A dilemma

[Monday night! Packers! Snow! Favre! . . .Dang.
Sorry, Lonnie. Want a cookie?]

The annual ritual is over, or nearly. The weeks in which the family room is overtaken with overpriced yet strangely popular boxes have virtually come to an end, and our regular clutter has resumed its accustomed place. You know those boxes--the colorful ones decorated with peppy slogans and pictures of multicultural groups of girls achieving or bonding or at least posing in front of some wholesome yet non-traditional activity. Boxes of cookies: the Girl Scout kind.

Compared to previous years, this one wasn't too bad. No one dropped more than $500 of cookie money on a dark, windswept porch and walked away without realizing it*, for one thing. And no one got hives from eating six boxes of Thin Mints*, either. Other than the personal fortitude it took for me to not sell 13 boxes myself to reach the goal the actual Girl Scout in the house clearly wasn't interested in, and the tediousness of the counting and sorting, and, how can I forget, the long-term stakeout that was required to determine where the heck the door to that gray house is now that they added that garage, it was painless.

But today we still possess three boxes of cookies that aren't ours, and I'm not sure what to do. Well, technically, they are ours, as they were covered in the giant check I wrote to the Girl Scouts a few weeks back, but we didn't order them. We've tried to deliver several times, but no one has ever answered the door, and no one has ever returned the message I left asking when would be a good time to try again. Personally, if I were pressured into ordering cookies from an unfamiliar yet charming 9 year old, I wouldn't be too sad if no one ever showed up to collect, but I have visions (small, vague, non-threating visions, but visions nonetheless) of my daughter being branded as the Girl Scout who Didn't Deliver, and I hesitate. Do I post a last chance note on the door? Sell them to the aunt who called dibs? Have a snack? The debate continues. On the other hand, if we deliberate just a little longer, we can wrap them up, leave them on the porch, and call it an anonymous holiday gift. I bet there's even a badge in that.

*Madison, 2005
*Allison, 1975



girl scout cookies