Dear Post Cereals

Dear Post Cereals,

I am writing in regard to your Post Alpha-Bits cereal. I respectfully request a product re-design, increased quality control, or perhaps a re-branding. “Partial Alpha-Bits” might be more accurate.

You see, last night, on Thanksgiving Eve, my mom sent me and my brother to the store to fetch some snacks, to be used to supplement the traditional thanksgiving fare and to be consumed before the traditional feast, and during the post-feast football-watching. Being the fine-food connoisseurs that we are, in addition to miscellaneous chips and dips, we also decided to start a new family tradition: Thanksgiving Cake. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but one we firmly stand behind. I think this new tradition will stand the test of time. Who, being in their right mind, would eschew a tasty piece of cake with buttercream frosting, as a chaser to the ubiquitous pumpkin and pecan pies? Anyway…

The hour being late, we arrived at the bakery to find no bakery staff present. This meant we could not request something awesome like “Happy Thanksgiving” be written on the cake. I was also mulling “Happy Indian Genocide Memorial Day,” because, well, we should pause to remember how we slaughtered millions of the first inhabitants of this land while we gorge ourselves on turkey and dressing. But alas, there was no cake artist to assist us. “No matter,” I thought. “I have a piping bag at home! I shall whip up some frosting and write the message myself!”

But, one thing led to another, and being more inclined toward laziness than industry, I found myself NOT wanting to whip up some frosting. Also, I had no food coloring. White frosting on white frosting does not easy cake-message-reading make! So, I was just about to resort to scratching something in the frosting with a toothpick when my genius wife reminded me- WE HAVE ALPHA-BITS IN THE PANTRY!

Genius, indeed. An entire box of edible letters! All I had to do was pick through and find the appropriate letters, and we’d be golden, as they say. But (and this is where my opening paragraph comes in to play), imagine my shock and despair when I realized I’d been sold a bill of goods, as they say. A plethora of Bs and Xs and As, but nary a G or a well-formed S. It was as if you had decided to populate the entire box with nothing but letters that are easy to make while in dough form!

I improvised, however, and have thus far managed to save the day. Your carelessness, however, nearly ruined this new tradition. I don’t know if you have letter-molds or injector programs for all 26 letters of the alphabet. Perhaps you do, in which case it is your sub-par quality control that meant that they did not find their way into my particular box. Or, perhaps you decided to cut a few corners. “Who,” you might have asked yourselves, “will notice if we omit a few of the less-important letters? These tasty bits will most likely be consumed in front of a television set, and more attention will be paid to the cartoon that is currently airing than the makeup of our cereal!” Well, I care, man. I notice. And it nearly ruined Thanksgiving.

If you look below you’ll see how I managed (through some careful rearranging, and not a little whittling with a paring knife) managed to assemble something resembling “HAPPY THANKSGIVING!” on the top of the cake.

You can see, this actually says “HAPPX THAZXCIXINO!” because I had to cut the tail off of the X to make a Y, and turned a Z 90-degrees into an N, and instructed people to squint when looking at the X so it sort of looked like a K. I have no idea what my G was originally intended to be, but the squinting again seems to help. Another X was sacrificed to make my V, and that N and G at the end are (maybe?) a crooked Z and an O with a cutout.

You guys are off the hook, however, for the exclamation point, which I fashioned out of an L. Your cereal isn’t called “Punctuation Bits,” after all, so it would be irrational for me to be upset at those being left out of the box.

As you can tell, my wife’s quick thinking and my above-par creative skills managed to salvage Thanksgiving from what might have been, thanks to you, a disaster. I hope you will remedy this situation quickly, as I hate to think what might have happened in a less genius-filled household.

Sincerely,

Greg Kendall-Ball