Nobody will make him a cake!

In the song Winter Wonderland, at one point there seems to be something going on that I don’t quite understand:

“In the meadow, we can build a snowman/And pretend that he is Parson Brown/He’ll say: Are you married?/We’ll say: no man/But you can do the job when you’re in town.”

Okay. So, in discussions and consultations over the past few days, it has seemed to me that a lot of people don’t actually know these lyrics. My first thought on reading them was that Parson Brown was someone’s name, but we can put that idea aside. Parson = protestant minister. Fine. So, is this some specific minister I should know about?

Then: why do they talk to him so familiarly. “No, Man.”

I had thought this was “No, Mam” or something like that, but it’s “No, Man.” That’s pretty slangy for talking with a pastor, even if he is actually a snowman.

I can picture this speaker expanding on it, “No, Man. It ain’t like that, Man. That ain’t how it’s gonna be, Man.”

And then, this: “you can do the job when you’re in town.” From the context, I guess “the job” is marrying them, but it sounds to me like they’re going to send this snowman off to do a gangland hit or something. 

Now. In reading online message boards frequented by eight-year-olds, I have discovered that this same Parson Brown character makes an appearance in the Frosty the Snowman story. I mentioned this to my friend Megan, though, and she was adamantly against that notion and actually — and a bit weirdly — knew all the lyrics to the song.

But Megan, what you don’t understand is that what the eight-year-olds are talking about is the Frosty *movie*, where Parson Brown marries Frosty and his girlfriend Crystal. Yes, Frosty the Snowman had a girlfriend. And thanks to Parson Brown, a wife.

I just find this ubiquitous Parson Brown character a bit odd, is all. Season’s Greetings.

The reason for my absence is that I’ve been in Scotland on one of my occasional trips there for a super-secret-project-I-can’t-tell-you-about that I’m working on. And they don’t have the internet in Scotland. Anywhere.

I’m also extraordinarily busy with a bunch of other projects I can’t tell you about, and since I’ve been out of the news loop, I have nothing meaningful to say. In essence: worst blog ever.

But I do have something funny Hitler-related, and Hitler is always good for a laugh:

I don’t actually use twitter (though I suppose it’s inevitable at some point) so I don’t actually understand half of this, but anyway…