Picture this:

It’s around 1:00 a.m. on the first of November in this year of MMXIX.

I’ve just returned home in a candy-corned stupor from some manner of haunted manor revelry, only to find a startling scene.

My box of Elf on the Shelf Cereal—the exhausting full name of which is Kellogg’s The Elf on the Shelf: A Christmas Tradition: Sugar Cookie Cereal with Marshmallows—had toppled from its sturdy coffee table standing onto the living room floor, while meters away, my dear impressionable cat’s food bowl had been knocked across the kitchen floor.

Could some freak breeze or errant radio frequency have unseated the box, triggering my chubby son’s bite and/or flight instinct? Sure.

But could some freaky malevolent watchdog elf have manifested as a cardboard projection, siphoning sustenance from cat kibble before rifling through my unmentionables? Also sure.

One thing’s for certain: good or bad, I need to eat this whole cereal. Only then can I break my homestead free from the decked-out thralls of the shelved elf’s limply puppeted surveillance state.

So you’ve heard of the Elf on the Shelf, but now get ready for A Sentry in Your Pantry.

Let me make one thing clear from the start: Elf on the Shelf Cereal is not better than Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch. In fact, it’s not even a close competitor. So if you’re in the cereal aisle and find yourself Mr. Burns-ing two sugar cookie cereals, calmly return the elf to his grocery store shelf without making eye contact (that’s how the curse spreads).

But with that out of the way, I can still say that Elf on the Shelf Cereal surpassed my expectations. After a whole host of flavorless sugar lame-Os from Kellogg’s—including the other two cereals Elf on the Shelf is debuting alongside—I wholly expected EotS Cereal to likewise be sugary swill in sugar cookie clothing.

Well thank your lucky orange and green stars, because Kellogg’s actually tried with this one. It’s a Novembermas miracle! Ignoring the part where these stars are carbon/carbohydrate copies of General Mills’ Mermaid Cereal, we can ascertain that these twinkling Elf bits are corn based, already setting them a few cwms below Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch.

As with most artificial sugar cookie flavoring, the exact taste notes in Elf on the Shelf Cereal can be tough to describe, and for every positive thing I can say about this stuff, there’s a caveat.

There’s a pleasant butteriness to each piece, but this ends up leaving a syruped stickiness in the back of your throat.

Elf on the Shelf Cereal levels up lazy attempts at vanilla flavoring with subtle ribbons of the stuff that bolster the buttery bites up to the cusp of doughiness, but of course there’s no nuanced egginess to complete the holy dough-fecta.

Most of all, this cereal has marshmallows too, to add sweet textural variety, but the reason it’s taken me so long to discuss them? There are fewer marbits in my box than there are creatures stirring on the night before Christmas. And the marbits that do rear their dextrose’d heads are somehow smaller and more disappointing than even Kellogg’s typical chiclet marbits.

So you can pretty much discount marshmallows from the equation and jump right to milk to soften the sharp edges on this sugar cookie cereal. Sop up the corny blandness, wash away the tracheal chemtrails, and assimilate the mite-sized marbits into a single creamy slipstream.

Once you do all that? Elf on the Shelf Cereal (or TEotS:ACT:SCCwM) becomes a passable wintertide novelty. Sadly, the flavor palette here isn’t quite as delightful as Kellogg’s esteemed Sugar Cookie Pop-Tarts, so if you’re really struggling to track down Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch, crumble up a couple pastries to give this Elf a little more meat on his spindly bones.

Err, maybe don’t. If I end up encountering a bloodlusted Shelfling tonight, I’d rather not be suplexed through a chimney.

Oh! And as a bonus, there’s a QR code on every box of Elf on the Shelf Cereal…which leads to the previously undisclosed news that there will also be Elf on the Shelf Blueberry Pop-Tarts Crisps to look out for! And here I was just expecting a downloadable cut-out Christmas ornaments.

The Bowl: Kellogg’s Elf on the Shelf Cereal

The Breakdown: Better than cookie-cutter sugar or vanilla cereals, but still a few dozen steps behind the G.O.A.T. of the sugar cookie genre. At best, you should keep a box of this stuff behind glass, to be broken in case of a Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch shortage—or left unbroken to avoid emergency Shelf Elf containment breaches.

The Bottom Line: 6 North Pole NSA agents out of 10