photo #8810460

The Cinnamon Bear is the ancestor of all Christmas fantasy characters. He debuted in 1937 with a 26 episode radio serial series that aired daily between Thanksgiving & Christmas as an advent calendar. Local dept stores could sponsor the show & license the characters for promotions. He proved so popular that the series returned in 1938 & some competitors appeared. In 1939 dept stores began creating their own in house characters, most famously Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer. The Bear continued to air on local stations for decades. There had been plans to publish a book version of the story but WWII intervened. After the war Rudolph got a song & it proved to be so popular that other fantasy Christmas characters were created in response such as Frosty The Snowman. A puppet show adaptation of The Cinnamon Bear appeared in Chicago in the mid 1950's but the Cinnamon bear had been left behind. In 1964 Rudolph got his own animated Christmas special that would launch an entire new genre. The writer of most of these Christmas specials was a man named Romeo Muller who'd been a boy when The Cinnamon Bear first debuted. He was always interested in radio & worked in that medium when he started out so he surely knew about The Cinnamon Bear. Characters like Burgermeister Meisterburger, the Misfit Toys, & Yukon Cornelius can all be traced back to the story, characters, & humor of The Cinnamon Bear. As the years rolled by the Cinnamon Bear became forgotten except for the few of us who remember what he is. From my archive, here's the original 1937 sheet music of The Cinnamon Bear's theme song so we can all keep his memory alive. The lyrics to some of the other songs are also here but there's no sheet music provided. This is a Christmas rarity that found it's way to me recently & had been in the piano bench of a grandmother for decades. Now her sheet music can be used to carry this on to a new generation.