The Lucky Charms

One morning in my college dining hall, I had a Revelation. Yes, with a captial 'R'. I was reared in a non-religious home, had been to church with friends, but certainly had never taken communion. Or had I?

As I ate my bowl of Lucky Charms cereal, I thought about how the marshmallow "Lucky Charms" had changed over the years, introducing new "marbits" such as the Purple Horseshoe and oddly a-lucky Red Balloon. But then I noticed something I'd never thought about before: sitting there amid the brightly colored Yellow Moons and Green Clover was a little innocuous piece of grain cereal... in the shape of the lowercase Greek "alpha".

Weird. Who'd choose that for a cereal shape? Not that it was any more incongruous than a balloon, though clearly more challenging to manufacture than a round thing. I started looking through the other cereal pieces, and I discovered:

a cross
a bell
a tree
a three-leafed clover
an alpha

What did all of these pieces have in common?

a cross: the Crucifix
a bell: a church bell
a tree: a Christmas tree
a three-leafed clover: St. Patrick's symbol of the father, son, and holy ghost
an alpha: the symbol of early Christians, a fish shape, now seen most often on the trunks of cars.

Then came the Revelation: the marshmallows weren't the "lucky charms" -- the cereal bits were.

Cloaked in the simple mythology of "charms," symbols of the moon, star, four-leafed clover, diamond, and horse shoe, were Christian "charms".

I don't know specifics about the person who designed the cereal bits while the marketing department was testing out all of their different marshmallow shapes, but in reading the wikipedia article, I have a theory:

Originally, Lucky Charms was prototyped as having grain cereal with uniform white marshmallows. Only after some testing did they determine that (they could create, and that) people really wanted colored marshmallows in fun shapes. So I believe what happened is that Lucky Charms was, in fact, designed with the grain shapes as being the actual charms. But these Christian charms were eclipsed by the more popular (and non-sectarian) marshmallow shapes. However, they didn't change the grain shapes to uniform pieces -- so Lucky Charms has always retained its Christian, and generally overlooked, roots.

In this sense, Lucky Charms has followed the same path as many holidays -- St. Patrick's Day is a celebration of St. Patrick, the man who Christianized Celtic Ireland -- but nowadays, we just pinch people not wearing green and get drunk. Same fate for Christmas and Easter -- Santa and the Easter Bunny are the marketing marshmallows that steal the spotlight from Jesus' whole-grain goodness.