I bet you expected me to start this review off with a snarky Christmas pun, right? Well to completely subvert your expectations, allow me to pose you a question:
Do you remember that episode of Yu-Gi-Oh where the villainous Maximillion Pegasus traps Yugi’s grandpa in soulless, unmoving card?
Though I’m sure the majority response to my question will be “Of course not: I have better uses for my brain’s real estate than oddly specific memories of early 2000s children’s cartoons,” this reference is appropriate for reviewing 2015’s rendition of Cap’n Crunch’s annual Christmas Crunch offering.
Why?
Because the gosh darn box refuses to change or have any soul!
By my estimate, Christmas Crunch has used this same blood red colored box (and trust me, calling it “blood red” makes it sound way cooler than it is) since roughly the time that Yu-Gi-Oh references were actually relevant. Okay, it’s actually only been seen 2012, but you get the idea.
Is it a bad box design? No: the confident Cap’n that yucks it up at the top of this box paints him as a friendly, welcomed, and Cheers-esque regular at our humble breakfast tables. Meanwhile, his overflowing box of cereal makes me wish that just once…just once…someone would gift me a seam-bursting present full of cereal so that I could finally and justifiably test the milk retention capabilities of cardboard.
It just isn’t the same when I try it with socks from Grandma.
But I like to dream bigger. I long for the return of annual gimmicks and phosphorescent box designs that I can look forward to as much as I do my annual ritual execution of sheet after sheet of hapless gingerbread men.
This is the season of giving, though, so I’ll give the Cap’n a break and instead just give his cereal a trip into my stomach. In addition to Cap’n Crunch’s traditional golden treasure chests (and what is a treasure chest other than a pirate’s Christmas present?), we get neon red and green Crunchberries in a variety of holiday shapes.
We have boisterous, pointed stars (as if the Cap’n needed another way to pillage the roofs of our mouths), surprisingly intricate Santa Hats (or gramophones, perhaps), snowmen that look more like those dog toys you stuff peanut butter in the bottom of, and trees that could easily double as a Bionicles weapon.
In terms of taste, if you’ve had Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries cereal before, you’ve had this. “Opening” the golden “chest presents” (had to search Urban Dictionary for this one before writing to make sure it wasn’t slang for anything) releases an equally golden, toasted sugar taste that smacks of buttery richness and peaks with a hedonistically satisfying glaze of dense coconut oil.
The entertainingly shaped Crunchberries have a familiar tropical sweetness that tastes vaguely like a real fruit, the elusive name of which will eternally be right on the tip of my red and green-dyed tongue. It’s the very kind of delicious, borderline genuine fruitiness that causes unreasonable people to make unreasonable lawsuits.
When “decorated” with milk, the blend of flavors tastes like a merry lava flow. The browned sugar and dense tropical goodness brings to mind memories of toasted Belgian waffles topped with well-aged strawberry syrup. It might scratch your throat, but it might also touch your heart.
So while nothing here is different from regular Cap’n Crunch’s Crunchberries, and while I have to dock the Cap’n (As a captain, I bet he’s used to being docked) a couple points for his serial cereal crime of box redundancy, there is still something magical about Christmas Crunch.
When I eat it under the light of my Christmas tree, and the glowing lights refract off of the tinsel and bathe the pieces in a dreamy, nostalgic spotlight, I swear I can taste something different about it: some additional sweetness that is inevitably just a pleasant placebo but is also a testament to Christmas Crunch’s ability to subtly create lasting holiday memories.
And if you somehow managed to stick with me through that sappy, wistful soliloquy, I thank you, friend. Your reward is a delightfully radical, vintage Christmas Crunch commercial that absolutely screams “The 1990s!”
Enjoy!
The Bowl: Cap’n Crunch’s Christmas Crunch
The Breakdown: A rerun box is the only sore spot that detracts from this buttery, fruity cereal’s impressive ability to make even reruns of sitcom Christmas specials feel like scrapbook-worthy holiday events.
The Bottom Line: 8 contextless animated GIFs of Maximillion Pegasus out of 10
First of all, yes, I do remember that episode…
But, do you remember even further back when this came with a big tube of white frosting to decorate your cereal with? (Like a giant version of the icing packets you get with Toaster Strudels) It was far too large a portion for one bowl, but had no way to reseal or store it, so I imagine most kids, (myself included) just blew the whole thing in one sitting. It was glorious and terrible. I made myself so sick with all that sugar.
The best part about this cereal is that it always go on clearance every Dec 26th! But you’re right of course; it may be just Crunchberries, but there is some kind of flying reindeer magic that makes it taste like the best bowl of Crunchberries you’ll have all year. I wonder if we will get a new Capn flavor next year? He needs to try the chocolate thing again IMHO.