Cookies! The picture on the round, blue tine with its lid shoved tightly in place called The Cookie Monster in me to add the Scottish shortbread to my menu for a morning cup of tea. Just what I wanted. I reached across the counter to check out the cookies. I lifted the tin. It did not sound like the shuffle of white pleated paper cups filled with cookies.
Slipping my finger nails under the rim, I pried it open to find — not cookies — but a collection of buttons. Big buttons, small buttons, white, brown and metallic buttons; funny and fun shaped buttons in all sort of colors — a delight to the eye — but definitely not cookies.
Foiled again by the Recycling Elf. No cookie feast for me.
Instead, I held a veritable feast for the eyes and fingers. Little ones enjoy a tin of buttons for the surprises hidden among variations on plain white, shirt buttons. They enjoy sifting their fingers through a cascade of buttons and picking up buttons to study their shapes, sizes and imprints. Little ones relish finding buttons molded into the shape of animals or toys.
The tin could just as easily have been filled with mechanical parts. I, too, am guilty of stuffing covered tins with something other than cookies. I fill them with sewing machine parts, accessories, needles and measuring devices and tuck them deep into the drawers of my sewing machine cabinet. I know they don’t hold cookies; they create metallic sounds when I pick them up. The original cardboard boxes for the accessories deteriorated long ago thus necessitating the tin storage units.
To avoid any confusion for other Cookie Monsters, I make sure to keep them a long way away from any food center. My husband ignores my admonitions to keep the food containers in the kitchen. The moment he hears the whisper of the Recycling Elf, he grabs any handy, empty container to store spare nails, screws, paint brushes or other odd and ends from his shop.
The Recycling Elf encourages re-using store packaging — or he did in the era before flimsy plastic and cellophane packages replaced sturdy metal and wood boxes in many shapes and sizes. Now the packaging is only fit for disposal once we pry them open. Previously, plenty of kids claimed those sturdy boxes and tins for their personal treasure chest and filled the containers with gadgets, stones, tiny toys, jacks and mementos speacial only to that child.
An old favorite in metal boxes across the country for decades — the rectangular-shaped, metal Band-Aid box filled with various sizes of Band-Aids could fix any boo-boo a child of the 50s or 60 might incur. Add a Band-Aid to Mercurochrome and a kid was good to go.
(For the uninitiated, Mercurochrome came in tiny, dark colored bottles with a rubber stopper attached to a glass rod. Parents dipped the rod in the red liquid and swiped it over the open wound. It stung! Which obviously meant it healed. Right? A couple decades ago, lacking scientific studies to prove its efficacy, the FDA forbade its sale over state lines — and it disappeared from store shelves.)
But, back to the Band-Aids. After we emptied the metal box of Band-aids with its hinged lid, parents universally saw it as the perfect size to hold the used crayons spilling out of their original, now ragged, box. The Band-Aid box withstood months of rugged use from little artists.
No one reaches for a box of Band-Aids and finds crayons these days. Now even Band-Aids come in thin cardboard boxes. The lovely smell of used crayons will never waft up from a Band-Aid tin again — carrying with it the promise of an afternoon huddled over a desk with a clean sheet of manila paper and crayons.
In recent years, department stores have capitalized on the Recycling Elf and have begun selling generic, colorful empty metal and plastic containers for packaging a dozen cookies and selection of holiday candy to share with family and friends. If a recipient is quick enough, she can empty out the tin and re-gift it to the giver with the recipient’s own stash of holiday goodies.
Since I can’t eat treats that fast, I save and recycle the gift tins (or plastic containers) with a colorful collection of spools of threads. They may not be crayons, but they do delight the creative eye just as much.
The Recycling Elf keeps busy finding stuff to put in used metal containers. Too bad, so sad for the Cookie Monster that his favorite filler cannot be the only solution.
Joan Hershberger is a staff writer for the El Dorado News-Times. She can be reached at joanh@everybody.org