Dear Skittles

March, 2012

Dear Skittles.

How are you? Well, I hope. I bet you are – sitting there all skittled with the different colours. That would be fun. What colour do you like best?

My boy loves Skittles, so I’m writing to tell you that. And I’ve attached his drawing here of Skittles Beard. That’s me when I woke up once from a nap on the lounge and there was a Skittle stuck in my beard and my boy says: “Hey Skittle Beard, you keep your sticky pirate ways outta here old man”. That’s what he says. What a kid. He thinks I’m a Pirate mostly on account of my eye patch (it’s on the other side of Skittles Beard’s face in the picture, so you can’t see it. I told him he should draw it on the other side of the paper but then he said it’d look like Skitltes Beard had a really skinny face, like a sheet of paper. I guess he was right. What do you think?).

Skittles are big round here. I buy a couple of the real big bags a day and when I was a kid I bought about five of the little bags each day. My boy loves them too. He has them on his cereal most mornings. Except Sunday, then we have pancakes. I don’t know if you noticed, Skittles, but they’ve been taking out all the sugar in cereals. Did you know? So they all taste bad now and then you have to put your own sugar in anyway. And all these people are thinking like: there’s no sugar anymore, how healthy! And then they’re putting in their own sugar – I mean, who wants cereal without sugar?

Anyway, my boy says: why do I put sugar in my cereal when I could put Skittles? I told him he was crazy, but I realised he was right. I mean, Skittles has real fruit juice right? And they’re all different colours, which means they must be different fruits (I can never pick which, but my boy has made a chart of which is which on the fridge – I can send it if you like), and which means they must have different vitamins and good stuff. Right? So, now I let him put them in there and it really is great. I wanted to ask you Skittles: I know they have sugar in them, but is it good sugar? Is there a good sugar and a bad sugar? I mean, because it’s fruit sugar and it’s coloured, is it better? Is one of the colours better than the others? I mean, should we just put green skittles in because they’re better, and maybe the blue ones aren’t as good? I think the red ones wouldn’t be as good, if that’s the case. Red’s usually bad-arse. I wear a red shirt when I play Skittles Beard and chase my boy around the house with the sword I made. It’s not a wooden sword, either, it’s a proper big old steel one. It really gets some swing.

We made a cannon too, and we’ve been scraping the dust off sparklers for three nights now. We’ve got two buckets of it and we reckon that’ll be enough to shoot a cannon ball over the back fence a couple of times. We don’t have a real cannon ball but when I dropped off my boy at his friend’s birthday bowling party, I had a quick bowl and I took one of the balls. I wore the Skittles Beard outfit and pretended I was a bowling pirate and was giving them a lesson, then I walked away with the ball and told them I had to teach some more buccaneers. I guess I didn’t really need to wear the Skittles Beard outfit, but it’s easier to explain the eyepatch that way, and well, I was excited about getting the ball for our pirate cannon too – so I guess it made sense…

Anyway, my real question was that. Which colour should my boy eat with his cereal? I think green, but you know best. By the way – is green apple or is green melon? I’ve been fighting about it with the boy for weeks now. He can never win because I have the sword and all, but I thought it’d be fair if I asked you. If it’s apple, I think that’s great – that’s what I had thought. I think you should make a red apple version too. And you could make it look like the red apples that have the upward streaks of yellow and green – kind of marbled like. That’d be really neat. It’d be just like a little apple except a Skittle. I mean if Skittles are little fruits, why are they all one colour all over?

You should make Skittles cereal too. That’d save us a lot of work – especially because we’ve been separating all the colours before we mix it in. Did you know that Sultana Bran have cut down on their sultana ratio? They really use to be quite generous with the sultana, now there are less and less every time. One day the boy counted out all the sultanas in a new box and an old box he’d found slipped behind the esky in our pantry. Do you know that the old box had 1213 flakes and 328 sultanas and the new box had 1321 flakes and only 243 sultanas? See what I mean? We used to add extra sultanas but now we add Skittles. We use the dark ones so they blend in more and if someone walked in they would be all like “are you eating skittles in your sultana bran?” They just wouldn’t notice and we could keep eating. You could make a sultana skittle and you could have it in a shrunken shape, just like a sultana is. It’d be like a big skittle with the air sucked out: all shrunken and soft. But it’d be delicious and then we could add that to the sultana bran. Or you could just make Sultana Bran with Skittles in it. Except it’d be Skittles Sultana Bran, wouldn’t it. That’d be great. I’m going to write to Kellog’s and get you guys together. I think that’d be nice. Do you mind? You pay commission right?

I hope you like the picture from the boy. He wanted to show you what Skittles mean to us. He’s a good kid. A real bright kid with good ideas (like the Skittles Sultana Bran). I guess you should pay the commission when Kellog’s call you. I sent them this letter and the picture also – just so they know the full context of our relationship.

Well, that’s all. It’s been nice to write to you and do write back.

Skittles Beard.

by Sparrokei