Psycho Cookie Jars?

It was quite a search!

My anniversary is today, so that of course necessitated a gift.

I figured that shopping would be easy though, for I knew exactly what I wanted to give. An antique cookie jar.

Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

No, not so the granddaughters can have a treat. Rather something nice for our new dog! The poor dog needs a good place to store her treats! And we have the perfect place for such a jar. It needs to be well placed of course so that no one ever forgets to give the dog a snack.

It’s not like the dog is spoiled or anything, but it doesn’t seem right making her eat treats served from a plastic bag.

I did figure that the quest for the perfect cookie jar would be quick and fruitful. That I’d find something really wonderful without much searching, especially since the major industry in my little city seems to be antique shops.

No dice. No way. I was dead wrong about that. I ended up spending two days looking for the perfect antique cookie jar.

I discovered that there’s lots of cookie jars in antique shops that aren’t actually antiques. Stuff they sold in stores when I was a kid. Don’t want something like that, as it’s going to be kept on an antique cabinet.

I also found a few, not very many, but a few, truly beautiful antique china cookie jars. Those all seemed to be priced as if they were sterling silver instead of china. Undeniably beautiful, but it would make my heart skip a beat when one of our granddaughters dropped such a precious thing and I watched it shatter.

This brings me to the third type of cookie jar I saw in all of these shops. Undeniably quite old, but not the hoity toity stuff some snob would have bought in days gone by. Nope, the regular ones that would have been in houses early to mid last century. I found lots of these.

They were made to resemble clowns, or bears, or fat people, even dogs. All manner of figures, and all kinds of them. But, I couldn’t bring myself to buy one.

Why, you ask?

Because, I think that there must have been some sort of weird conspiracy back when these things were made to keep kids from eating too many cookies by scaring the crap out of them!

The clowns didn’t look like friendly clowns. Nope, they looked like psycho clowns who needed to be in prison following a string of serial killings. It wasn’t any better with the bears, and maybe worst of all was the one with the fat lady who looked like she was passed out from too much fentanyl.

That wasn’t the worst one though.

The absolute worst one was crafted to resemble a dog. And it really did. The coloring was different, but the face shape and ear shape was a perfect match to our actual dog. I mean the thing was a dead ringer.

Except for the fact that it was painted in such a way to make it look as if the dog had been unleashed from the fires of hell. My poor little ten pound Daisy dog turned into a hellhound, suitable to be cast as Damien’s sidekick in the next Omen movie remake.

I almost bought it. I’ve got to admit it was cool. In a serial killer kind of way.

But, in the end I decided that I’d probably wake up each night screaming if it was here in the house.

After much searching, I finally managed to find an antique cookie jar that didn’t look as if it was possessed by ol’ Satan himself, but it was a much more difficult search than I could have imagined.

I’ve always been kind of an antique nut, but I guess I never really looked at old cookie jars before, because I never noticed that they were almost all apparently designed and decorated by malevolent demons.

Those poor kids who grew up sometime between 1900 and 1960, it must have taken a heck of a lot of courage for them to snag a cookie!