Frosted Lucky Charms - They're magically delicious.
Frosted Flakes - They're great!
Snap, Crackle, Pop - Rice Krispies.
Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids!
Can you tell I just served breakfast to my children? It amazes me that these cereal commercial phrases are forever etched in my mind. I didn't take the class Cereal Advertisements 101 or Commercialism and the Modern Child or How to Memorize Catch Phrases. I put absolutely no effort into memorizing any of these verbal jingles - but they are embedded in my brain as if I had studied them my whole life. It probably helps that every Saturday morning as I watched the Smurfs and Scooby-Doo Mysteries that they played these commercials constantly. It probably helps that they put most of them to music. It probably helps that I was a young child when I saw them.
They say that when you memorize something as a child, you remember it much better than if you memorize it as an adult. I believe that is true because most of the things I memorized as a child I can still remember, while things that I memorized last year or last month I've already forgotten. The things that we believed as children are easier to remember too. No matter how illogical or wrong they were - it is harder to shake the belief, even as an adult. For instance - are Frosted Lucky Charms really magically delicious? I'm pretty sure they're not - but it still feels true to me. When I see a box of them on the shelf at the grocery store - I am drawn to them (almost magically:) When I pour them in a bowl and start to eat them, I immediately think "these tasted much better when I was kid" and I vow not to purchase them again. Yet, they still find their way into my grocery cart on subsequent shopping trips. It's strange.
I think that when we were children life was more magical and we were more trusting, so we accepted things whether they were true or not. Things tasted good to us because we believed they would and so they did. We were innocent and our minds were like a blank page to be written on. As we grew older, we became more skeptical. We began to see things as they really were - not what others told us they were. We got disappointed. Santa Clause isn't real? I can't fly like Superman? This cereal tastes horrible! People were unkind to us. Life wasn't turning out like in the movies - happily ever after. Our innocence and dreams were being taken away by the harsh realities of life. We had to grow up and leave all of that magic behind.
I don't think it has to stay that way though. As an adult, it has been my goal to re-capture some of that magic. To believe in the possibility of things that aren't logical and to dream again of fairy tales and happily ever after. I know that Lucky Charms aren't really magical and I'm OK with that. I've learned that it's OK to be disappointed, but it's not OK to always be skeptical. I've learned that people aren't perfect, but I've also learned that I don't have to be perfect either. I've learned that there is a lot of loss in life, but I've learned to open up my heart anyway. I've learned that life is both good and hard, both wonderful and sad and that if we really learn to embrace it, I would even dare to say it can be magically delicious.
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