Can't Sink Me! The Gingerbread Pirates by Kristing Kladstrup

It was Christmas and Jim and Mother were making gingerbread men.

"Let's make a pirate crew," said Jim, and so they did.

The Captain had a gingerbread cutlass and a peg leg made from a toothpick. Jim loved him best of all.

"You'd better leave some pirates out for Santa Claus to eat," said his mother.

"NOT Captain Cookie!" said Jim.

But upstairs, propped in the place of honor by Jim's bed, Captain Cookie begins to worry about his crew downstairs.

"Where's my crew?" he wondered. And who's this Santa Claus who wants to eat them?

Downstairs Captain Cookie finds two members of his crew, Dots and Wavy, adorning the tree, and dodges a mouse who nibbles the business end off of his cutlass. And then there's the threat of that "cannibal Santa Claus." Will he eat his whole crew, held captive in a large jarlike brig? With no cannons, a broken cutlass, and a disabled crew, what's a pirate captain to do?

But then a big man in a red suit appears and gives Captain Cookie what he wants most--a pirate ship and crew all his own under the tree. It's a yarr-y Christmas after all for the confused Captain Cookie and his perplexed but piquant pirate crew.

Kristin Kladstup's latest, The Gingerbread Pirates, (Candlewick, 2009) is just the thing to spice up your Yuletide story time this Christmas.

And for a Yule tale that will really get yer YARRRs out, there's always Philip Yates' clever and comical A Pirate's Night Before Christmas. My 2008 review of this corsair's Christmas yarrr-n can be seen here.