Oh, shit! We're screwed! Cancel Christmas! Seasonal celebrations threatened by nationwide butter shortage

Seasonal celebrations threatened by nationwide butter shortage

People stopped drinking so much milk for some reason a few years ago and the Bureau of Making Bad Decisions got rid of too many cows.  Now we're coming up on the winter holidays and people want their romantic Christmas cakes and aren't going to get them.  Fortunately, not many osechi items require butter so the crisis is being contained mainly to ex-pats and young Japanese couples.  Grandma can still make toshi-koshi soba for New Year's and there will be plenty of mochi for Grandpa to gag on and suffocate to death while trying to eat.

I wasn't aware of a butter shortage.  We use margarine at our house.  We haven't even shopped for real butter as far as I know, not even when we were baking cakes and cookies together.  What's it like to live in a butter-less world now that I know there's a shortage?  Why, just the same as before I knew.  It's kind of like when I first became aware of the show Big Bang Theory.  The chances of my interacting with it made it seem as remote as a space-frog on a distant planet light years away.   Butterless Christmas cakes!  Idiots wandering around in BAZINGA! t-shirts!  Meaningless to me.  I am surrounded by a bubble of invincibility these things have no power to penetrate.
 
Meanwhile we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past where there is butter aplenty and reruns of Cheers.