Chia Pet Revival

By Ryn Gargulinski
Imagine your surprise if you opened a gift mailed from your mom and found inside a Chia Pet.

What a blast from the past. What a cute, funny gift. What a fine, kitschy find.

What a hunk of junk.

This is not to say that Chia Pets in general are hunk of junk. Well, the head that grows hair and the hippo are somewhat stupid, but the idea itself is quite adorable.

Millions of others thought so when the Chia Pet craze hit like a wave soon after it was marketed by Joseph Enterprises in 1982. This is the same company that brought us the infinitely amusing – and effective – Clapper, although it took lots of convincing to get my boss to buy one for his inaccessible lamp in the corner.

For the Chia Pet, the best selling point, by far, was not the promise of fresh herbs sprouting on your kitchen windowsill. Nor was it the adobe molded ram that could have very well come from the wiles of old town Mexico.

The selling point was the jingle.

Catchy and cute, the stuttering ch-ch-ch-chia song can still make one dance and sing with significant glee.

With that stuttering song strumming in my head, I promptly opened my mom-sent Chia Pet expecting a long-lasting relationship with an adorable chunk of adobe.

Instead I found a mangy something encrusted in at least 20 years of dust, crust and blacked herbs. Herbs evidently don’t like it when you stuff them in a box in mom’s basement for a couple of decades.

After dutifully scrubbing the adobe with a vegetable brush I’ve since thrown away, I mixed the exact three tablespoons of herbs with the exact three tablespoons of water and slathered my newly-clean Chia with the mixture.

It promised to grow in five days.
Five days later, it did grow.
It grew mold.

Perhaps I should have been tipped off when the seeds had a test date of 1988.

I left it there for a few days, hoping the mold was not really mold and just the way Chia seeds are supposed to sprout.

But once white stuff started breaking off the ram’s butt and floating around the kitchen, I figured it was time to let it go.

After my dog and I stopped choking on floating mold spores long enough to tell mom what happened, she promised to send a new gift to make up for our pain and suffering.

I opened the mail yesterday to find a pet rock.
Another fine blast from the past.
With green, fuzzy spots where the eyes should be.