Gingerbread.

It's December 22! Happy Christmas Eve Eve Eve!

One of the Christmas songs that always comes up in my iTunes this time of year, along with "Silver Bells" and "Santa Can't Stay," is "Sweet Gingerbread Man." Mark Steyn, who as a singer is an excellent writer, recorded it as a duet a few years ago with Jessica Martin, and I just love it.

I remembered this song running here and there when I was a kid, and liking the melody, but being totally confused by the lyrics.

Feel like I'm made out of gingerbread
Uh huh (uh huh) uh huh (uh huh)
Crumb pickin' lip lickin' gingerbread
Uh huh (uh huh) uh huh (uh huh)
Can't think about rainy weather now
I've finally got myself together now
Fresh out of the pan sweet gingerbread man
Fresh out of the pan sweet gingerbread man

What does that even mean?

Well, I guess it means the singer feels good, and you certainly get that. Kids like to sing cheerful songs, and this one is very easy to sing.

The thing is, it was not written as a Christmas song, despite the preponderance of gingerbread and peppermint mentioned in the song. It was written for The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, a 1970 film that is definitely not for kids, and probably not for adults. I've never seen it, but I gather from the summary at the usual place that there's a lot of failure to launch going on in this movie. Which makes the dreamlike, childlike qualities of the song perfect for it. It sounds like sunshine pop, but in the context of the film in which it appears, it seems to have been intended as irony.

There is a creepy factor to it when you read the complicated and sad plot to the movie, all tangled up in group sex and suicide and drug use and loneliness and various pathologies. In other words, 1970. The movie was a flop, but the "Gingerbread" single did well, and the song's been recorded by a Sarah Vaughn, Bobby Sherman, Sammy Davis Jr., and other well-known vocalists.

It was also performed on The Muppet Show, which I found cranked the creepiness up to 11:

Sometimes the Muppets entered that uncanny valley; there's something about these stiff, clomping dancers with their dead eyes that makes them look like henchmen for Jadis the White Witch. I think I would have liked it better if the singer had been Frank Oz, doing it monster style, instead of that plaintive Jim Henson wheedle. We're in clown territory here.

Henson's stuff was usually a lot of fun, but not always good for kids. There are grown people who still have nightmares over The Dark Crystal. I remember a Sesame Street / Electric Company prime-time special called Out to Lunch that definitely had some dark business. (In one game show takeoff, a man loses his home and family and appears to be about to lose his own life.)

Well, you never knew what you were going to get in the magic garden of Jim Henson.

Remove the song from all its context, though, and you have a happy, peppy tune. Steyn and Martin perform it that way, and it's great. Makes a nice twofer with their duet on "Marshmallow World," in fact -- both sort of from the Christmas-songs-on-drugs genre. Enjoy!