merican Express is the official card of Disneyland. Aunt Jemima is the official pancake mix. Coca-Cola the official soft drink, Carnation the official ice cream, and if my family could nominate the official breakfast cereal, it would be…Fruit Loops.

OK, so this really isn’t a Tradition that Disneyland creates, but the eating of Fruit Loops is a Tradition that has everything to do with the Disneyland vacation.

ou see, for those of you 30 and under, a long time ago there were few choices in breakfast cereals, (maybe that was just in my house) and almost none of them had sugar. Breakfast cereal life was confined to Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran, Special K (for dieters) and Shredded Wheat (for those who liked to punish themselves). Oh, and I forgot the Grape Nuts, which were very popular until Euell Gibbins dropped dead in the forest somewhere, and people figured that nuts and twigs and all that dental work was not very healthy after all. If you were a kid, you got to have Cheerios. If you were a lucky kid, you got Frosted Flakes. I wasn’t so lucky.

So what is the point, you ask?

y memory may be stale, but I seem to remember the only cereal in my home being Cheerios, which I hated. As I aged from 4 to 6, trips down the cereal aisle at the grocery store with my mother got more and more interesting. There was more to choose from and more and more sugar enhanced morsels in new and exciting shapes. My home still saw Cheerios, Raisin Bran and Special K and, if we were bad, Shredded Wheat. The escape from cereal hell came during trips to none other than Disneyland.

e always drove from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Magic Kingdom, bringing our ice chest and staying in places that had little refrigerators or very reliable ice machines. To be thrifty, we always ate breakfast in our room and this meant that before we went, Mom would buy variety packs of those little cereal boxes that came in bundles of 8 or 18 boxes. You may remember those little convenience boxes with the perforated sides where you could cut on the dotted lines and make the box into a bowl. The waxed paper lining was just enough to keep the milk inside long enough for you to eat the 3 tablespoons of cereal that was inside. The variety pack was great fun, and my brother and I would continually look it over on the way down, staking claim on the ones we wanted. It was a very big deal because there among the Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran and Cheerios were FROSTED mini wheats, FROSTED flakes and the ultimate prize, FRUIT LOOPS!

ruit Loops were the best! Often the bundled variety packs came with doubles and when Mom took one of those from the top shelf of the cereal aisle we carefully inspected it to make sure that there were two boxes of the colorful O’s.

wenty six years later, a similar ritual began to take place. Nowadays, you can stay at so many places that offer free breakfast. There are bagels, bread to toast, lots of coffee and a few different cereals. From one place to the next, you almost always see Fruit Loops. Now I take after my own mother our cupboard has modern day versions of the old stand-bys. We have Honey Nut Cheerios and Crispix. Honey Nut Shredded Wheat is downright tasty compared to the roofing shingles of long ago. But we still don’t eat the sugary stuff at home. So, it was no surprise that Fruit Loops were a big deal during that first trip to Disneyland for our own little girl. She’s a smart one, and hates to be told no, so she’ll ask for things in a very indirect way. “Oh Mommy,” she says. “Isn’t that pretty cereal?” And so, she had her first special bowl of colored rings, and always looks forward to what has become “the Disneyland Cereal.” And you know what? So do I!

I would love to hear your family's Disney traditions, please drop me a line,

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— Allison