Who could have anticipated starting off the holiday season with a mysterious email, from a random student, with the single word “Cinnamon” bolded in the subject box? For the select C.K.M. students who check their student Gmail regularly, this seems as hilarious and unreal as a Twitter meme.
Word about the cryptic email spread around C.K.M. within a few days of its delivery on December 1st. Some were baffled, others were amused, but everyone at C.K.M. wanted to know who belonged to the name Ellis J. Penn, and, more pressingly, why?
Ellis J. Penn is a freshman at J.F.K. and the briefly famous author of the cinnamon email. For those who know him, it was no surprise he was the creator of such excitement.
It is short, simple, and strange. The email begins with an insistent “Cinnamon? Where? Do you see any?” Penn has looked everywhere for cinnamon, even venturing to the “Cinnamon Isle, off the coast of California, where Autumn never ends and the colors never fall.” Upon discovering only ordinary cloves, nutmeg, and allspice, Penn was seemingly left right where he began, on a distressing search for the cinnamon that his “great great great great great great great grandfather has been drinking since the winter of 1750.”
Josie Castaneda, a senior at McClatchy and good friend of Penn, enjoyed her fellow student’s email and found it to be one of the funniest things she had ever read.
“Ellis really is something else and it didn’t surprise me when I realized it was from him,” said Castaneda. She was somewhat endeared by the act, saying “I know him well. I’m sure he just wanted to wish us Happy Holidays in his own creative way.”
It wasn’t difficult to figure out how Penn managed to pull off his prank. Taking a closer look at the recipient box, the address belongs to SCUSD, not a student. Rather than send the email to every student individually, Penn cleverly used the district’s master list to deliver his holiday wishes. Every student at McClatchy is included on that mailing list. It’s the same address that the district would use to quickly and efficiently contact everyone at once.
Unfortunately for students at J.F.K., not everyone was blessed with the cinnamon email. Instead, only a handful of students received an equally puzzling cupcake email, also from Penn. After describing the stress-relieving properties of cupcakes in descriptive detail, Penn happily asks the recipient of his spam for a donation to his Paypal so “the cupcake can be revived.”
He assures that if a sufficient donation is made, he will “see to it that this cupcake is returned home safely so it too can enjoy the holiday season.” Penn wraps up his novelty of an email with a gracious Thank You, and a rather professional “Ellis J. Penn, Mr. Cupcake Jr.”
There’s no clear answer from the author as to why he decided to send both emails to both schools, or what decided which school received which email. When approached about the cinnamon email, he simply responded, “I like cinnamon.
Nonetheless, Penn certainly came through with a delightful way to wish everyone at C.K.M. a well-mannered “Happy Holidays!” Who could be as unpleasant as to not appreciate such a uniquely festive well wishes?