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March 25, 2020
The Way the Cookie Crumbles
By Mikie Baker
Special to the Prophet
Mikie’s funny bone caught a slight cold, but she’s on the mend. While she continues her recovery, please enjoy this classic column from a few years back.
They say you can learn a lot about a person by how he treats waiters, children and dogs. If you can’t be civil to a waiter, you probably kick the dog and refer to children as “rug rats.” Though this truism has survived the test of time, I’ve just discovered another test of how to judge a man.
It’s all about animal crackers.
Last week, My New Boyfriend arrived at the Dancing Dog Ranch toting a small bottle of milk, a 99-cent coffee cake and a box of animal crackers. He announced, “I’m starving so I grabbed a little snack. Want some coffee cake?”
I am a woman who gains five pounds at the mere mention of anything made with sugar. If someone arrives with an entire pie, my hips spread at least an inch wider just by being in the same room with the dessert. After years and years and years of dieting, I am convinced that sugar is my mortal enemy. But I digress.
No matter the size of my waist, animal crackers are a right held by all humans. There are no calories in animal crackers. Instead there are cute little cookies, all neatly pressed into a variety of animal shapes. Heck, if we passed out animal crackers at a United Nations meeting, we could probably achieve world peace.
Did MNB offer up any animal crackers to me? No. In fact, he scarfed them down so fast, I was afraid if I tried to grab one, I’d lose a hand. I guess it could have been worse – MNB could have bitten off all the heads and left the torsos for me. Frankly, it’s happened to me before. Of course even a body is much better than nothing at all.
This incident has left such an emotional scar on me; I even Googled animal crackers to see why they call something that tastes like a cookie, a cracker. Of course it was the Brits as they always hide sugar in something identified as a biscuit or a cracker. But what I didn’t know was that animal crackers originated in 1904. That’s over 100 years of sharing a box of animals with a friend. Or maybe not.
Way back at the turn of that century, the manufacturer even added a string to the box so you could hang animal cracker boxes on your Christmas tree. Evidently this was a big hit because, you guessed it, there’s no one who doesn’t love animal crackers. Technically they are called “Barnum’s Animals Crackers” which makes them sound extra British and confusing.
What’s even worse news for My New Boyfriend is that I found his animal cracker box in my cardboard recycles so I checked the nutritional information. Did you know animal crackers are a great source of calcium? I guess it’s all those animal bones. But even worse, there printed clearly on the side of the box it says, “Servings per container: 2.”
I rest my case.
I was hopeful that I was finally in the perfect relationship. Now I’m having second thoughts. This man seems nice, but underneath it all, he doesn’t share his animal crackers. Frankly, I think he needs a time out.
Thank God my mother didn’t live to see this. Luckily, she has passed on to a place where she and Shirley Temple can sit and worry about me together. I guess it’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
They say you can learn a lot about a person by how he treats waiters, children and dogs. If you can’t be civil to a waiter, you probably kick the dog and refer to children as “rug rats.” Though this truism has survived the test of time, I’ve just discovered another test of how to judge a man.
It’s all about animal crackers.
Last week, My New Boyfriend arrived at the Dancing Dog Ranch toting a small bottle of milk, a 99-cent coffee cake and a box of animal crackers. He announced, “I’m starving so I grabbed a little snack. Want some coffee cake?”
I am a woman who gains five pounds at the mere mention of anything made with sugar. If someone arrives with an entire pie, my hips spread at least an inch wider just by being in the same room with the dessert. After years and years and years of dieting, I am convinced that sugar is my mortal enemy. But I digress.
No matter the size of my waist, animal crackers are a right held by all humans. There are no calories in animal crackers. Instead there are cute little cookies, all neatly pressed into a variety of animal shapes. Heck, if we passed out animal crackers at a United Nations meeting, we could probably achieve world peace.
Did MNB offer up any animal crackers to me? No. In fact, he scarfed them down so fast, I was afraid if I tried to grab one, I’d lose a hand. I guess it could have been worse – MNB could have bitten off all the heads and left the torsos for me. Frankly, it’s happened to me before. Of course even a body is much better than nothing at all.
This incident has left such an emotional scar on me; I even Googled animal crackers to see why they call something that tastes like a cookie, a cracker. Of course it was the Brits as they always hide sugar in something identified as a biscuit or a cracker. But what I didn’t know was that animal crackers originated in 1904. That’s over 100 years of sharing a box of animals with a friend. Or maybe not.
Way back at the turn of that century, the manufacturer even added a string to the box so you could hang animal cracker boxes on your Christmas tree. Evidently this was a big hit because, you guessed it, there’s no one who doesn’t love animal crackers. Technically they are called “Barnum’s Animals Crackers” which makes them sound extra British and confusing.
What’s even worse news for My New Boyfriend is that I found his animal cracker box in my cardboard recycles so I checked the nutritional information. Did you know animal crackers are a great source of calcium? I guess it’s all those animal bones. But even worse, there printed clearly on the side of the box it says, “Servings per container: 2.”
I rest my case.
I was hopeful that I was finally in the perfect relationship. Now I’m having second thoughts. This man seems nice, but underneath it all, he doesn’t share his animal crackers. Frankly, I think he needs a time out.
Thank God my mother didn’t live to see this. Luckily, she has passed on to a place where she and Shirley Temple can sit and worry about me together. I guess it’s just the way the cookie crumbles.