LIHU‘E — Booth sales for the Girl Scout Cookies start as early as this weekend, said Courtney Perreira, a Girl Scout After-School leader Thursday. Randi Lewis and Chelsea Gregg joined Perreira in breaking down the delivery of eight different flavors
LIHU‘E — Booth sales for the Girl Scout Cookies start as early as this weekend, said Courtney Perreira, a Girl Scout After-School leader Thursday.
Randi Lewis and Chelsea Gregg joined Perreira in breaking down the delivery of eight different flavors of Girl Scout Cookies for pickup by the different troops on the island.
For those Girl Scout Cookies aficionados who have not been contacted by Girl Scouts for their annual fix, booth sales are the only other source for the cookies, a familiar part of American culture for more than 80 years.
Perreira said booth sales will be set up at Walmart, all of the Big Save, Foodland and Long’s Drugs stores, the Girl Scouts usually setting up from about noon until 9 p.m.
This year’s flavors include the Do-Si-Dos, a peanut butter sandwich which comes in eight-ounce boxes, Dulce de Leche, a six-ounce box containing cookies made with milk caramel chips, Samoas, a seven-ounce box of vanilla cookies covered with caramel on top and bottom, then rolled in coconut and striped with chocolate.
Savannah Smiles are crisp, zesty lemon cookies named in honor of the 100th Anniversary of Girl Scouting, Thin Mints, a 10-ounce box containing thin chocolate-peppermint cookies coated in chocolate, Tagalongs, a seven-ounce box containing regular cookies with soft peanut butter and coated with chocolate, Trefoils, shortbread cookies in a 10-ounce box, and Thank U Berry Munch, a cookie made with premium cranberries and white fudge chips in a 6.17-ounce box.
The Girl Scouts of America is the premier leadership organization for girls and the $760 million Girl Scout Cookie Program is the largest girl-led business in the country, generating immeasurable benefits for girls, their councils and communities across the nation, states the Girl Scouts website.
Perreira said the Girl Scout After School program is fairly new and offers the benefits of Girl Scouting to young girls from kindergarten through Grade 5.
Registration for the After School program is always open and people interested in joining can see any of the elementary schools, including Island School, Perreira said.
The Girl Scout program is also available to girls in Grades 6 through 12, but those girls need to see a community troop to register.
Girl Scout Cookies’ earliest beginnings started in the kitchens and ovens of the program’s girl members with mothers volunteering as technical advisors, the Girl Scout website states.
The sale of cookies was a means to finance troop activities and started as early as 1917, five years after Juliette Gordon Low started Girl Scouting in the United States.
In July 1922, The American Girl magazine, published by the Girl Scout national headquarters, featured an article by Florence Neil, a local director in Chicago, Ill., providing a cookie recipe to the council’s 2,000 Girl Scouts.
Girl Scouts continued to bake their own simple sugar cookies with their mothers in the 1920s and 1930s, packaging the cookies in wax paper bags, sealing them with a sticker and sold door-to-door for 25 to 35 cents per dozen.
When World War II broke out, sugar, flour and butter shortages pushed the Girl Scouts to selling calendars to raise funds for their activities, and the first license to local bakers to produce and package cookies appeared, growing to a total of 29 licensed Girl Scout Cookies bakers across the nation by 1948.
Visit www.girlscouts.org for more information on the Girl Scout Cookies, or Girl Scouting.
• Dennis Fujimoto, photographer and staff writer, can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 253) or dfujimoto@ thegardenisland.com.
