On Being Careful What You Wish For

I have sent a lot of cookies to a lot of people over the last several years, and the recipients always say, "thanks" and "they were delicious" but I always wonder if they mean it. I mean, what else are you going to say to someone who baked you an assorted variety of Christmas cookies, then lovingly packaged and shipped them? "Um, they aren't as good as store bought" or "They were a little stale" or "Well, they were broken into a million crumbs, but I ate them over ice cream"?

I thought I solved the problem of wondering how they taste by trying to slowly eat all the cookies that I didn't send over the course of 5 days and noting any change in freshness or deliciousness. But that process does not take into account the shaking of the box, temperature fluctuations, or as Laura pointed out yesterday, the amount of exhaust the cookies would absorb.

So this year, after I sent Dave off to the shipping store, I was thinking about the whole thing all over again. Do people like to get cookies in the mail? I think I have received cookies in the mail twice and Bean is the only one who knows how the first set turned out. The second set were professionally made and were part of a miscarriage related care package, so they were delicious, but tinged with grief.

And so, and so, and so. So I thought, "Maybe I should ship some cookies to myself and see how they taste when they get here." This thought was dismissed after about 5 seconds of contemplation because, "only a crazy person would ship cookies to themselves to see how they taste. Right?" and "that seems like a lot of work."

Then I checked voice mail the other day, for the first time in several weeks apparently, and I found out that the cookies I had shipped to my cousins girlfriend, who I have in the handmade-gift exchange, did not receive her cookies because they had been returned to sender. So two days later, I finally made it to the package store to pick them up and when the guy handed me the box I said, perhaps a little too excitedly, "well, now we have a box of cookies to eat! And we can see if they still taste good!" I was talking to Luke, but the guy at the counter said, "Wow. Way to find a silver lining."

So the cookies were pretty much as good as they were when I sent them, so I still don't really know if the cookies are as good as they are in my mind, but they weathered their travels to Cleveland and back pretty well. Some were a little stale, but my instructions say specifically to dunk them in milk or coffee if they are stale, so that solves that problem.

And all I had to do was think, maybe I should ship some cookies to myself, and poof! It happened! Well, I had to make the wish and transpose a 9 and a 2, but you get the idea. This is not the first sort of lame wish I have made that has come true.

New Years Resolution Number 1: Start wishing for cooler things!