I’ve attempted to eat healthier these last few months, but when I see that brightly colored box in the pantry, all promises of sticking to “healthy” snacks go flying out the door. Really, Girl Scout Cookies are more than cookies, they’re a cultural phenomenon. I bet if you ask twenty Americans exactly what job Condoleezz Rice holds…well, I don’t know exact percentages but I can almost guarantee you the responses wouldn’t be 100% correct. But ask those same twentyAmericans what the hell a Thin Mint is, and they’d all be able to tell you.
I was a girl scout once, back in the day. I signed up in first grade because all of my friends were doing it. I was super excited because my troop had two leaders, so double the pleasure, right? Wrong. One was pregnant the entire year (I swear, she was at that “any day now” stage for a least three months), and the other had a really bad case of pneumonia. My biggest field trip was to the Friendly’s around the corner. Awesome.
So needless to say, I relied on friends and younger sisters when it came time to seek out a girl scout to satisfy my cookie fix. And with the marvelous invention of cookie booths, one never knows if their trip to the grocery store might result in a surprise encounter with a few new boxes of Tagalongs. The prices keep going up and up, but I’m willing to spend it. If a restaurant can charge six dollars for a pint of beer, I will certainly splurge on some Samoas.
You can freeze Thin Mints, that just makes them that much better. If you buy one or two or twelve boxes, you can eat some, and stick another sleeve in the freezer. Then, in those summer months when there are no girl scouts going door to door (do they even do that anymore or is the fear of strange sexual predator neighbors too strong to ovecome?) you can dig past the frozen vegetables and pizza-for-ones and voila, some frozen Thin Mints just waiting for you.
A friend who is studying abroad recently mentioned that if we stumbled upon a girl scout, to get her a box of Thin Mints since, sadly, Juliette Gordon Low didn’t feel the need to extend her girl scout program worldwide. Oddly enough, I found myself at a girl scout luncheon a few days ago, as part of my internship. I had to sit through a number of ridiculously corny speeches about how wonderful scouts are (I’m kind of a cynic because again, my biggest field trip was to Friendly’s), and I also had to endure the ramblings of a crazy girl scout mom who ended up at my table. But at the end of the lunch, we all received goody bags, and I was the lucky one who got a box of Thin Mints in mine. Now, I already had a box of Samoas sitting at home because my cousin sells them and I felt obligated to buy a box (and when I say obligated I really mean I couldn’t pass it up), so the nice thing to do would be to pack up those Thin Mints and bring them with me when I visit this friend abroad.
However, I don’t think she’ll want the empty box, which is all there is left. One cannot resist the temptation that is a good Thin Mint.
