Yikes! It’s the last day of February–something to be grateful for. But to my horror, I realized I hadn’t written a blog this month. It seems to be getting harder and harder to do. I actually started out the year thinking I’d try to write at least two blogs a month, but clearly that’s not happening.

I have gotten ideas for blog topics, but they’ve seemed lame or just too mundane to bother writing about. I keep waiting for inspiration that somehow seems to elude me lately. Nevertheless, I decided today I would finally write about a news item that made me laugh when I read it back on January 27th. The headline read “Discount on Nutella Spread Sparks Chaos”.

First of all, you need to know that I love, and I mean LOVE, Nutella. Last year I spent a week at Skyterra Wellness Retreat and I recall a class on nutrition in which I asked if Nutella was good for you. Of course, the instructor politely suggested that I try to make my own. Hey, I’ve made a lot of changes to improve my eating over the years–I bake my own bread, I eat fruit and vegetables everyday, and hardly ever eat red meat. Nutella was something I was unwilling to give up.

Besides, I regard Nutella as sheer perfection and I simply can’t see the point of trying to make my own. How can you improve on perfection? Heck, Nutella on honey-oat bread is one of the first things that attracts Detective Nick Manelli to my heroine Holly Donnelly in Second Bloom.

Okay, so now you know my relationship with Nutella. Imagine my reaction when I read the headline: “Discount on Nutella Spread Sparks Chaos”. If I had read that on-line, I’d have been certain that the article was satire, but since I was reading The Greenville News, and not Mad Magazine, I had to read further.

It turns out that in France the price of 950-gram jars of Nutella was reduced from $5.85 to $1.75. Quite a good discount. Here’s what happened:

“Chaos erupted in supermarkets across France as shoppers brawled to get their hands on discounted Nutella…Police had to intervene in a brawl in the northern town of Ostriccourt, Le Parisien newspaper reported. An employee at one store in Forbach, near the border with Germany, linked the scenes to an orgy, telling Le Monde Newspaper that shoppers had broken items in their rush for the treat.”

In France. Of all place! Can you believe it? I would have thought this was the kind of behavior at which the French would look down their haughty noses. I mean, aren’t the French always dignified, stylish, elegant? At least, that’s the image pervasive in American marketing and advertising.

I had to laugh out loud the other night when I saw one of those commercials for Cindy Crawford’s miracle face cream that was created by a doctor with special melons that come from the somewhere in France. I wondered if she would sell as many jars of face cream if those melons grew in Poland or Guatamala. I also wondered if a discount on her beauty products would create as much havoc as the sale on Nutella.

Well, the long and short of it is I really got a kick out of that news article. If you’ve read any of my past blogs, you may already know that I’ve stopped watching television news because I just can’t bear it most days. I still read the paper, though. Finding amusing news is not easy, but sooner or later, I manage to come across a headline that makes me laugh. Hope it did the same for you. Happy end of February!