Our two are crafty and creative which is fantastic if a little bit surprising (they certainly don’t get it from either of us!) So you can imagine how keen they were to get their mitts on the packet of colour-me-in Rice Krispies. No sooner had I said ‘Snap! Crackle! Pop!’ and they were off…

Looking at the two of them colouring in together took me back to the days when my brother and I used to sit opposite each other at the table, heads bent over our bowls of Rice Krispies, listening to the ‘Snap! Crackle! Pop!’. Just as they began to argue over which colour pens they were going to use – my brother and I weren’t shy of having an argument or two!

In fact, one time a packet of cereal was used as a shield with disastrous effect. Wouldn’t it be fun we thought to take it in turns to block body blows with the cereal packet (it could have been Rice Krispies). Don’t try this at home kids because as you can imagine, it wasn’t long before a fist went straight through the packet and caused an eruption of cereal to spill out of the box and all over the floor. Our Mum wasn’t pleased. We spent a long time on hand and knee picking it up… and blaming each other…

Reminiscing about cereal (as you do) it got me thinking that Rice Krispies must be one of the very few products that hasn’t really changed over the years. Yes the characters have been modernised, they’ve got cute T-s now but principally the ethos and ingredients have remained the same. Why, they even still make the same sound or so I thought…

A quick squizz on Wikipedia told me that all those years we’ve been hearing ‘Snap! Crackle! Pop!’ kids in other countries have been hearing something entirely different.

Here’s a little quiz for you (the answers are at the bottom). See if you can identify which country hears these sounds when they listen to their bowl…

1. Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!
2. Knap! Knaetter! Knak!
3. Piff! Paff! Puff!
4. Pim! Pam! Pum!
5. Pif! Paf! Pof!
6. Cric! Crac! Croc!
7. Riks! Raks! Poks!

1. Germany, 2. South Africa, 3. Sweden, 4. Mexico, 5. Netherlands, 6. Canadian French, 7. Finland
Source: Wikipedia

Go to the Rice Krispies site for more information on the colour-me-in packs and for arts and crafts and recipe ideas.