The Thin Mint Is the Best Cookie Ever Made

PHUTATORIUS
It's that time of year again: the days are getting longer, the great, bracing bulwarks of snow on either side of our driveways are shrinking in size (it's almost imperceptible, but it is happening), the sun is shining upon us, and the Girl Scout Cookies are out.
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Holy crap! The Girl Scout Cookies are out! They'd set up a table in the Harvard Square T station: it took me completely by surprise on the way home from work Wednesday night. I stopped, did an exaggerated double-take, bought five boxes.

Now I know I'm prone to enthusiasms, and I know, too, that it's probably not best to write when I'm jacked up on mass-market baked fundraiser goods and a lemon flavor-injected Big Gulp. Even Wordsworth, that great Romantic poet, made sure not to commit his "spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling" to writing without first "recollect[ing them] in tranquility." But I'm sorry — I've got to say it:

The Thin Mint is the best cookie ever made. Seriously. I love the Oreo, and I'm wont to observe, in moments of weakness, that when Nabisco Doubled the Stuf they halved the distance between man and God. I don't mean any disrespect to Mithridates, whose hometown gave us the Fig Newton. That's a good cookie, too. And pretty much anything with a Keebler Elf on it gets a gold star from me (especially the Fudge Stripes). But the Thin Mint is far and away the best cookie you can buy.

It's so simple. It's so perfect. The blend of chocolate and mint can't be matched — not in the Mint Oreo, not in your York Peppermint Patties, not in your chocolate chip mint ice creams and their several hundred variations ("grasshopper," etc.). The Girl Scouts have it down, and I have to tip my hat to them, notwithstanding they're a quasi-fascist organization that does nothing to prevent or forestall the transformation of its members into that most cruel and abased form of human being, the teenage girl (yeah, I'm still bitter).

Wikipedia tells us that, notwithstanding its strictly seasonal availability, the Thin Mint is the third best-selling cookie behind the Oreo and Chips Ahoy (Chips Ahoy? Are you frickin' kidding me? They're like sand cakes with chocolate jimmies in 'em.). It says something, doesn't it, that people hoard up boxes of Thin Mints and scalp them on eBay? It says something, too, that it's "Cupcake Day" here at work, but I'm not in any kind of condition right now to partake of any of the several plates of homemade offerings folks have brought in, because I packed away half a sleeve of Thin Mints walking to the office from the parking garage.

Now the philosophers might disagree with me, but I'm the kind to believe that perfection can be enhanced (that's why I'm always going back to edit these blog posts). On that score, I recommend that FO readers put their Thin Mints in the freezer before eating them. My mother taught me this trick. They're cold, they're crunchier. I won't say it's the only way to eat a Thin Mint, but it's surely the best.

In summation, I declare today that the Thin Mint is the best cookie ever made in human history. I will challenge to a fight and beat down to the ground anyone who says otherwise.