A new twist on cereal-box collecting

Cereal boxes are like album covers.

The cardboard frontispiece doubles as a canvas for the creative types employed by the cereal makers. They’re limited in their subject matter, but a true artist rises above such limitations. Narrowed options merely concentrate the force we call creativity, like a poet confined to seven syllables in haiku. (Or a copy editor given a tight headline count on a one-column story in the old-fashioned world of print journalism.)

I’m a sucker for pop-culture art, and early on in our frugal-living experiment I remember being so taken with a couple of cereal boxes that I felt compelled to save them. A few years later, taking a spin on eBay, I discovered my empty boxes had no value to collectors, who prefer “mint condition” packages with the cereal still inside (and no doubt still edible, even years later, thanks to all those amazing preservatives.)

Well, I’m too thrifty to let a box of cereal go to waste. So now when I want to preserve a cereal-box cover, I convert it into something I can actually use: a file folder.

Actually, my first few cereal-box file folders were pressed into duty not because the covers were cool, but simply because we needed file folders and I didn’t want to go buy some. It takes only seconds to strip the extra flaps off a cereal box -- most of the time I just tear neatly along the edge, and don’t even bother hunting down a pair of scissors -- and if you leave one narrow side of cardboard connecting the two broadsides, when you fold it into a file one side naturally rises above the other, creating space for labeling what’s inside.

Cereal-box collectors may disagree, but I believe my method actually enhances my appreciation of cereal-box art, because it cranks up the function part of the form-function ratio without destroying the form. (Assuming you consider the form to be the “cover” on the frontispiece, as I do, and not the box in its entirety, as they do.)

There’s also the occasional satisfaction that comes with matching up a cereal cover with the material that goes inside, like the Life cereal folder that contains my “Stuff to Deal With” paperwork, or the Special K folder that holds my Weight Watchers material.