He said
The Oreo turned 100 years old on March 6. It certainly has lasting power and seems to be plugging along just fine in this economy, with a factory in Montreal producing one billion individual Oreos each year.
There are so many anniversaries that we could potentially celebrate this year, like any year, that it's probably easier to just ignore them all. Unless you're part of the Royal Family or have a Sunday brunch date with the Queen pencilled onto your calendar each week, there probably isn't much sense in celebrating the Queen's 60th year as Canada's head of state and oldest living member of the House of Windsor.
Very few of us have worked for Oreo, or whichever company owns the brand, so we have no ties to the black and white cookie that gave its name to one of the forward lines from the first Mighty Ducks movie.
For 30 years, Elvis Presley's Graceland has been open to the public. If you're a Broadway buff, you may well wish to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Grease. Now it's only Broadway's 13th longest running show, but at the time of its closing in New York in 1980, it was the longest running show in Broadway's history.
It's the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. That involved Brits and Americans more than it did Canadians, but I see the merit of recognizing the historical significance of that event. Let's just wait another 100 years to check back in. We can skip the 250th marker.
Let's start being a little more choosy about which special days really are special.
She said
I don't really have a problem with the celebrating stupid things. Consider that I have celebrated it being a Wednesday, and not crashing my car into things on occasions when I just needed a reason to celebrate.
So I'm totally fine with celebrating anniversaries of things like Oreos. For one, Oreos are awesome. They've been around for 100 years, so they have to be good. And even if they'd only been around for 15 years, Oreos would be worth celebrating.
I'm pretty sure we are conditioned to celebrate stupid things right from birth. When explaining how old their children are for the first two years, parents always seem to say things like "16 months," and "Oh, she'll be 20 months next week." No one ever says "He's something like one year, give or take a couple of months." So right from the beginning, we're told that counting insignificant things is important.
Then we all turn into teenagers and suddenly the most important anniversary we celebrate is the number of months we've been in a relationship. Celebrating dating three months seems pretty important when you're 14, but it's not really something that continues into the rest of your life. Later in life, it's strictly about years ... and even then, you may not remember the actual date.
So there's nothing wrong with caring that North America's favourite cookie has reached an age that many of us will never see because of obesity. Obesity because of eating aforementioned cookies. And it only would have made sense to celebrate the birthday of Oreos by eating them until you throw up. I approve.
