The Advent Calendar has been updated for December 3rd, 2006, complete with tiny box of Hostess snack cakes.

Speaking of goat meat, after a near decade-long drought in this area, I've finally, finally, finally found a new box of Christmas Crunch cereal. I spent many years falsely believing that the stuff had been discontinued, when in fact, it was always more of a case of my local grocers being unapologetically unChristmassy and not asking Quaker to send them any. That's still the case around these parts, actually. I had to drive all the way to a pharmacy in Jersey, one that lives under the pretense that its two aisles worth of edibles make it double as a supermarket, to find it. Worth it? YES.

Internet hunting has clued me in on what Christmas Crunch boxes have looked like from year to year. I'll always remember the nigh-original box as the most iconic, but really, not much has changed -- it's just gotten gaudier, and that's always welcome around the holidays. The bright green box again features Cap'n Crunch in his Santa garb, along with a slew of green graphics, Christmas lights and funny ornaments. You barely need to decorate the house with a box of this stuff around.

The Christmas Crunch of old consisted of regular Cap'n Crunch cereal mixed with red and green Crunchberries, and the formula hasn't changed too much -- just that the usually roundish Crunchberry shapes have been replaced with hot holiday shapes; namely, Santa caps, Christmas trees, stars and snowmen. They're easier to decipher on the box than in the bowl, something attributed not so much to breakage than to the fact that...well, they just don't really look like those things. Close enough.

I eat cereal dry, like a hamster, because I hate milk, like a straightedge Alien Nation dude. I'm pretty indifferent to the normal Cap'n Crunch cereal bits, and find myself cherry-picking anything that's red and green, treating them like sugary power-ups that fill my soul with more and more holiday spirit upon every swallow. Good stuff.

By the way, if you doubt the power of Christmas Crunch, know this: I opened the box in the presence of my sister's two girls, who absolutely could not believe that "Christmas had a cereal." They also cherry-picked the red and green bits.

The back of the box features a cutout ornament -- at least, I'm pretty sure it's an ornament. You're supposed to cut it out, insert your picture and loop a string through the top. That sounds like an ornament to me. There's also the usual gamut of on-package puzzle games, so you have something to do while eating breakfast besides chew.

Posted by Matt on 12/03/2006. E-mail me!