Cool Deals...

About six or seven years ago, I was helping a distressed friend move out of her townhouse. It was a messed up affair: she was 8 months along, her jackass husband had left for another, her rent was months past due, and she had to leave.

Among the stuff she was tossing were several bottles, most unopened, of some of the finer priced hootch. Seems Jackass had some image conscious tastes: Patron Tequila, Stolichnaya, Hieneken, some cognac I couldn't pronounce, Ballantine's, other stuffs ...and Maker's Mark whisky. She told me to go ahead and take it home. I did, and most of it ('cept for the Stoli and the Hienies, which I kept) ended up with friends and step-sons.

Personally, I'm not much impressed with labels and price tags and was even less so with this collection, which I had disparaged as 'Jungle Juice', in honor of Jackass's ethics and ethnicity.

Recently, I had a slight change of heart at the local liquor store when I saw Maker's Mark on sale for $16.99. It's normally closer to the $25+ and up range, and I'm like "Oh?"...
It was a holiday, as in last Christmas, 'gift pack'. OK, so this hootch has been sitting a while and now they want to move it. Cool, I'm in.

The gift pack consisted of a bottle of juice, some extra packaging and a goofey bauble to go with, which turns out to be a not so goofey bauble after all.

You see, it says right there, on the overstated packaging, that this bauble is actually a hand-dipped (Maker's Mark employs a marketing fetish that involves wax dipping of it's hootch bottles) Christmas Tree ornament, special edition... the design of which was personally chosen by a named distillary supervisor.
Imagine that...


Knowing that I might have an actual collector's item of some value, I did a search of Ebay. I found none listed.

I'm guessing everybody else is holding on to theirs, waiting for the price to go up.