Everyone remembers the good old days when a cleancut white guy would deliver a glass bottle of milk to your doorstep, and earn a living wage doing it. Then the Canadianists subverted American society, and the blacks moved in, and with them that despicable Canadianist tradition of drinking milk from bags gave rise to the cultural miscegenation of plastic milk bottles.
White people degenerated from delivering milk in glass bottles under an always-blue sky to housewives who never had sex with their husband's co-worker next door when the man of the house was out of town on business, to slurping milk from plastic bottles while their civil union loudly fornicates with two off-brown co-habitants of both or either gender on the Ikea sofa in the next room.
But, no longer!
I went to the store today and was surprised to find
GLASS bottles of locally produced milk for sale! Because I am a smug left-wing bastard, I decided to buy one, to reassert my arrogant belief in my own moral superiority. Doing my part to support local farmers and fight Canadianist subversion!
There is a catch - the deposit on the bottles is $2. But, of course, you get it back, and glass bottles are less disgusting and perceptibly improve the taste of the beverage. Oh, and help save the planet that God gave us. Us, and not those evil Red Indian folks.
But, not all is well. The Red Canadianists are on the run, but the Red Chinese are infiltrating and subverting American society, turning sacred icons such as the Christmas boot into a
crudely functional device for storing garbage storage. Clearly, the goal is to associate the sacred symbols of Christmas with garbage, and lead this American tradition into the abyss of atheist consumerism.
How do I know the Red Chinese are responsible? Besides the fact the thing was made in China?
Have you ever visited a china store? Ever notice how they have rows and rows of glass, plastic and ceramic containers to store stuff? There is actually a very good reason for this. Chinese immigrants are poor, and they watch every penny. They know something lost on Americans: protecting food from spoil and waste, and holding on to every little thing, from twine and rubber bands to yarn and safety pins, is a formidable and easily underestimated way to save money. (Some of us are old enough to remember our grandparents, who were alive during the First Great Depression, doing the same thing later in life, holding onto every little bit of twine and rubber).
If you buy a reusable plastic box for a few bucks, it WILL pay for itself many times over, making food last longer and consuming more of the contents of each package. A good plastic box is one of the soundest investments you can make. Try it if you don't believe me.
Whether this particular item saves money is questionable - it will probably slightly less than break even - but
the sales pitch, as overwrought as it sounds, is actually factually correct. Most people don't actually use every garbage bag in the box, and by the time the majority of the box is exhausted, the remaining bags are usually filthy with grime and dust that they attract due to their static charge. Besides the bags, reducing clutter is a powerful money saver.
Having realized this, we can foil the evil Red Chinese plot to despoil Christmas, by stringing up the repurposed Christmas boot and reminding ourselves that, indeed, the new era is upon us, when people make socially responsible consumer decisions on thoroughly rational and witty grounds.
PS: What really annoyed me about this entire episode was that it had occurred to me that both those things - a new incarnation of the 50s-era milk delivery service and a way of storing garbage bags - would be profitable business ventures. Angers me that someone else got there first. I need to figure out what to do with my life.