I present for your reading enjoyment a short article on what I hope is a very Merry Christmas for fans of The New Leaf Journal (my first Christmas-day article since 2022).

I went to Lot Less (a discount store) with a friend on Saturday, December 20, 2025. I usually buy food and chocolate at Lot Less. However, on this occasion I remembered that I needed handwashing soap for the bathroom. I picked up a decently-priced large bottle of bath soap to use as hand soap. I was planning to buy that (along with a box of Lara bars and cookies) when something caught my eye near the register. You will find a photo of that something below:

A clear, transparent plastic soap dispener in the shape of a gingerbread man. The gingerbread man is smiling (eyes and mouth but no nose) and has a red bowtie, three red and green "buttons," and white stripes around its arms. It is full of soap and appears light brown. It is sitting on a white soap holder.
He sees you.

The gingerbread man dispenser (with gingerbread-scented soap) spoke to me. I did a quick price comparison and determined that, while the gingerbread man did not have as much soap as the one I had been planning to buy, it cost about the same per oz of soap. Tie-breaker? Gingerbread man bottle.

Tag for Ginger Bread Refillable Hand Soap. Shaped like a gingerbread house and colored light brown with gingerbread flourishes. Has a Good Housekeeping stamp of approval.
I like the tag but I am not clear why it features peppermint hard candy.

Upon bringing my gingerbread man soap home, I confirmed that it not only worked as expected, but also had a distinct (and not overwhelming) gingerbread scent. But something else occurred to me as soon as brought him home.

Back on January 18, 2024, I shared a photo of Pokémon graffiti on a dumpster in Brooklyn.

Photograph of a blue dumpster on Cheever Place in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill, just off Degraw Street. There is a Ditto from Pokémon painted in the center of the dumpster.

The Pokémon on question was Ditto, a pink blob known for transforming into other Pokémon (I think the graffiti was intended to be Ditto for reasons I explained in my article). While Ditto in the video game copies the appearance of its transformation target perfectly, a Ditto in the Pokémon anime (episode 37 to be precise) was unable to copy the face of its target, leaving it with its own face. In 2017, the Pokémon company released a line of plushies depicting Ditto transformed into many Pokémon but never quite getting the face right (see Bulbapedia page and 2025 article). Look at the Ditto plushies and then look at my gingerbread man soap dispenser. I have reason to believe that my soap dispenser is a Ditto that tried to transform into a gingerbread man.

Back tag for Ginger Bread Man Refillable Hand Soap. Shaped like gingerbread house and colored red. Has instructions for use, ingredients list, warnings and disclosures, and manufacturing information.
Here we learn the soap is manufactured and distributed by Votum Enterprises.

Merry Christmas!

PS: I am already thinking about finding the right soap for the eventual re-fill.

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