Christmas 1925

Welcome to our Graphical History Tour Christmas Special! We're just about through with the year 1925, when peace, goodwill, and sobriety reigned, and all was right with the world.

"Merry Christmas" by William Hanny in Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 25, 1925

I'm going to let Bill Hanny represent all the cartoonists who updated their Thanksgiving for General Prosperity cartoon for the next holiday on the calendar. The happy recipient of an overstuffed stocking here was Father Penn, the cartoon personification of the state of Pennsylvania, and not the guy on the Quaker Oats canister.

"Uncle Sam's Dream of Christmas" by Edward G. McCandlish in Washington Post, Dec. 25, 1925

McCandlish at the Washington Post expands on Hanny's theme, depicting a serving of Plenty, a Christmas tree festooned with Peace, Security, and No Foreign Entanglements; and, at lower right, an agreement between labor and management averting a coal miners' strike. That agreement hadn't actually materialized yet when this cartoon was drawn, however.

"The Very Thing He Wanted Most" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Dec. 25, 1925

Up the road at the Star, Clifford Berryman's Everyman had a more limited wish list. To his delight, Congress had passed the Coolidge administration's tax cut, to take effect in 1926.

"Good Will to Men" by Gustavo Bronstrup in San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1925

Gustavo Brunstrup shared the San Francisco Chronicle's optimism that the U.S. Senate would overcome three years of obstruction by its "irreconcilables" and join Europe in agreeing to participate in the World Court.

"Christmas Bells" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 24, 1925

Critics of the Coolidge administration such as Daniel Fitzpatrick might begrudge Republicans their peace and prosperity; they could still celebrate the Locarno agreements among the major European powers putting an end to war (offer not valid in Morocco, Syria, and Iraq), and the Geneva Protocol, drafted in June, banning chemical and biological weapons.

"The Face at the Window" by Ed LeCocq in Des Moines Register, Dec. 24, 1925

Ed LeCocq used the celebration of "the new spirit of mutual cooperation" and "comforts of capital and trade intercourse" in Europe to point out one country that was left out: Russia. 

"The Face at the Window" used to be a common cartoon theme in the Christmas season. In most such cartoons I've seen, that Face is a pitiable, sympathetic figure, left out of the warmth, feasting, and bonhomie inside, reminding readers of the plight of the poor. The cultural references that Google up for this forgotten cliché, however, are tales of criminals, murderers, and ghosts plotting their way in.

Perhaps that's why cartoonists stopped using "The Face at the Window" as a caption.

"Besorgnis" by Arthur Krüger in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Dec. 13, 1925

A pair of German cartoons took skeptical views in varying degrees of Europe's newfound international comity. In Arthur Krüger's cartoon, Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Italy merrily dance around their Christmas tree, with its "Peace on Earth" topper, but Not-So-Jolly St. Nicholas worries that they are about to carelessly kick the whole thing over. In an age when candles, not LED lights, lit up the Christmas tree, knocking the tree over was liable to get it considerably too lit up.

"Der Untaugliche Nussknacker" by Werner Hahmann in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Dec. 27, 1925

Werner Hahmann's Angel of Peace found the League of Nations (Völker Bund) not up to the task of cracking Disarmament (Abrüstung). 

These German cartoonists in the 1920's really were a bunch of sour pusses. It's as if they knew they were between the Wars.

"In the Hollow of His Hand" by Jesse Cargill for King Features Syndicate, ca. Dec. 24, 1925

Returning to America, I'm not sure what to make of Santa Claus holding the globe in the hollow of his hand. Does Jesse Cargill's Santa Claus look as annoyed to you as he does to me? He almost looks like he's getting ready to throw it at someone.

"Aw-w, There Ain't No Santa Claus" by Leslie Rogers in Chicago Defender, Dec. 26, 1925

There's no mistaking Leslie Rogers's intentions. Rogers's cartoon for the African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender ran alongside an editorial decrying the lynching in Clarksdale, Mississippi of Lindsey Coleman after a jury had acquitted him of murder charges. This while southern Senators were successfully filibustering the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill for the third consecutive Congress.

"The Night Before Christmas" by Sam Hunter in Toronto Star, Dec. 24, 1925

Meanwhile, in Canada, the Progressive and Liberal Parties had both lost seats to the Conservatives in October elections, but not enough of them for the Conservatives to have a majority. Robert Forke's third-place Progressives had lost 36 of their previous 58 seats in Parliament, but held the balance of power between William Mackenzie King's Liberals, with whom they were more ideologically inclined, and Arthur Meighen's Conservatives.

"The Spirit of a White Christmas" by James Fitzmaurice in Vancouver Daily Province, Dec. 24, 1925

Shunting politics aside, James Fitzmaurice gets us back to some Christmas Spirit. The cartoon's "Mr. Citizen" had finished his shopping, subscribed to the newspaper's charitable fund (charity drives were a common newspaper practice at Christmastime), and apparently had a couple of libations he doesn't want to talk about. 

"Minus Whiskers and Reindeer" by Roy James in St. Louis Star, Dec. 24, 1925

Roy James noted that Santa was not the only one doing the heavy lifting for the holiday. 

"The Annual Daze" by Chester Gould in Chicago Evening American, ca. Dec. 25, 1925

The editorial cartoons of Chester Gould, later creator of "Dick Tracy," have appeared here before. This cartoon predates the pointy-chinned copper by about five years, and seems at first glance to be a light-hearted little gag about office employees not having their minds on their work between Christmas and New Year's.

Then one notices the little dingbat in the lower left corner. What Lincoln getting shot has to do with anything else in Gould's cartoon is completely beyond me.

So let us wrap up this week's Graphical Holiday Tour with a simple Christmas card with no weirdness, politics, faces at windows, or diareses

"Merry Christmas to Our Readers" by J.T. Alley in Commercial Appeal, Memphis Tenn., Dec. 25, 1925

And likewise to mine.

I Guano Wish You a Merry Christmas

Hi there! You're just in time to join another Graphical History Tour through the archives of your humble scribbler's December cartoons, carefully aged in our ancient wine cellar, each evidencing floral legs with notes of winter stone leather and an earthy finish.

2015

First off, let's get into the spirit of the season with a couple of classic Christmas movies.

We watch a fair number of classic movies in this household, especially at this time of year. After a while, the plots do seem to get mixed up in my head. Did we just witness a miracle on 34th Street, or did it happen on Fifth Avenue?

One thing that I've always liked about parodying old movies like this is that I don't have to spend the usual time making separate grayscale and full-color versions for syndication. Nope, just save the grayscale version, convert it to CMYK, fill in the pink triangle, and voilá! The colorized version is already finished!

Which reminds me, I think tonight we're watching Dudley the Angel show up to help Charlie Brown find the true meaning of Christmas in Frosty, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

2005

Speaking of whom...

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Dec. 9, 2005

Do I remember the point of the editorial this cartoon was meant to illustrate? No way. It had something to do with corporations securing "air rights" above ground level for such things as skyways connecting buildings on opposite sides of a street. 

That was the fourth-to-last cartoon of mine in the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. At the end of the year, they decided that they didn't want to run cartoons on the editorial page any more, in favor of a weekly thumbs-up / thumbs-down listicle.

I got more appreciation from the Chicago Free Press that December, which used a cartoon of mine on the front page of their year-in-review edition.

in Chicago Free Press, December, 2005

The Chicago Free Press was a client of my cartoons for their entire run, from 1999 to 2010; this caricature of Dubya Bush was actually from a cartoon I had drawn in August, 2003.

1995

in Journal Times, Racine Wis., Dec. 21, 1995

Christmas week does generally not suit itself to cartoons about the beach hereabouts.  

The city had hired an expert from the National Water Research Institute to determine the source of  fecal coliform bacteria that had forced the city to close North Beach several times during the summer. Human feces were the prime suspect, but in December, the expert reported that preliminary studies pointed instead to gull droppings.

Dad was on the Racine Board of Health back then, and still is, so I get the inside poop on any matters related to public health here. And yes, gull droppings have been a factor in beach closings: they crap on the sand, and that stuff washes into Lake Michigan when it rains.

But human shit was also a major part of the problem. As a result, Racine extended its sewage outflow further out into the lake. The study cast much of the blame on Milwaukee's sewage system; during heavy rains, untreated sewage had to be released into the lake in order to minimize it backing up into everyone's basements.

Since then, Milwaukee's Big Tunnel project has largely addressed that particular problem. This past summer, Racine only had to close North Beach one time (but did have to issue advisories on two other occasions).

1985

I had drawn a couple Christmas issue cover cartoons for the University of Wisconsin at Parkside student newspaper by 1985, making oversized editorial cartoons for them. With the 1985 edition, I decided to make a simple, straightforward holiday greeting.

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 12, 1985

I also departed from usual by drawing exclusively in charcoal. This meant I couldn't erase anything if I didn't like it, and having to be extremely careful not to smudge the drawing. The original drawing is too large for my scanner; if I could have posted the original drawing here, you would be able to see all the blue pencil underneath the charcoal.

The medium of charcoal did not afford the Ranger editors much opportunity to add color to the drawing. This was well before PhotoShop and other quick and easy artistic tools; to add color, someone would have had to lay a halftone transfer sheet over the drawing and cut with an Exacto knife the desired shapes for each area where the color should print.

I  had created the Ranger flag that year, and every shape you see in green, I made using that same halftone cutting process. (Ignore the yellow; that's just the discoloring of 40-year-old newsprint, or however old it was when the UW-P library scanned it. I Photoshopped out the yellowing from the Peace on Earth drawing for this post, but not from the flag.)

Well, heck, why don't we go back yet another ten Decembers just for gits and shiggles?

1975

in Park Beacon, Dec. 19, 1975

That takes us all the way back to my high school days. This cartoon was something I drew to illustrate someone else's (possibly Executive Editor Joel Krein's) Twelve Days of Christmas list.

The principal surrounded by garbage, and the school nurse, by the way, were caricatures of real persons. And I'm quite sure that none of my fellow students caught the reference to a running gag in "Fibber McGee & Molly," a radio comedy that was well before our time. Before Assistant Principal McKee's time, too.

Somehow, the school administration let us get away with this cartoon. If I remember correctly, the Park Beacon had to yield to administration censorship once in the two years that I was on staff. An installment of Kevin Cacciotti's "Being Cool in School" comic strip included advice to "destroy school property," and Principal Thompson made us black the cartoon out of every copy with magic markers.

Except for the copies we saved for ourselves.

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Well, that's the Graphical History Tour for this week. Thanks for coming along, and have a Merry St. Lucy's Day!

Q Toon: Driven to Distraction

I was halfway through inking last week's cartoon when I came up with this idea, which is not how things generally work inside this old noggin. I liked this idea better, so I held onto it and hoped that the Trumpian firehose of outrageous fuckery this week would not include something I couldn't possibly not draw about.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his pet legislature, and Transportation Secretary Sean "Road Rules Real World" Duffy have all been on a tear this year destroying rainbow crosswalks and anything else painted on pavement that doesn't celebrate heterosexual cisgender white Christian males. They assure us that it has nothing whatsoever to do with discriminating against LGBTQ POC DEI FAFABs; oh, my heavens, no.

Rather, it's a matter of roadway safety. How are drivers supposed to keep their eyes on the road when they come across a blinding splash of color or a reminder that Black Lives Matter?

So over the course of several weeks in September, the Florida Department of Transportation came in the middle of the night, again and again, to sandblast painted pavement, tear up colored bricks, and leave municipalities with unsightly messes where public art once graced the roads. The state further threatened to withhold funding from any municipality that dared to repair those defaced rainbow crosswalks.

The rainbow designs may be gone, but Equality Florida sees a pattern, "This isn’t about safety. It’s a cowardly abuse of power and the latest in his campaign to ban books, whitewash history, and attack LGBTQ people."

Anyway, have yourself a happy little holiday, whatever distractions bedazzle you along your travels.

But please, unlike the drivers in today's cartoon, do try to stay on the correct side of the road.

This Week's Sneak Peek

From the pencil rough that eventually became this week's cartoon:

It bothered me that most of the editorial cartoons about the My Lai massacre that I had selected for last Saturday's Graphical History Tour seemed to excuse Lt. William Calley's role in it; so yesterday, I dug up one more cartoon taking a contrary position and added it to the others. It goes against the rules of blogging, but apparently rules don't mean anything any more.

Christmastoons

Welcome aboard today's Graphical Holiday History Tour, working backward in time through some of my December cartoons from years ending in four.

Our first stop: 2014.

for Q Syndicate, December, 2014

Vlad the Defenestrator has been on his antigay crusade for over a decade now, harnessing the power of the state against any perceived threat from "homosexual propaganda." 

Among the musical sine qua nons of the Christmas season (besides "All I Want for Christmas Is You") is the Nutcracker ballet of Pyotr Illych Tchaikowsky. It no doubt irritates Mr. Putin that Tchaikowsky was gay, although the fact that the composer was miserable about it probably mitigates Putin's pique.

The Nutcracker ballet has not yet been banned in Moscow, but I wouldn't expect to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo's rendition of it there any time soon.

for Q Syndicate, December, 2004

In the dawning days of the 21st Century, there was no Grindr, no Scruff, and no Chappy.

What gay men had way back in 2004 were on-line chat rooms. Well, everybody had chat rooms; but as was the case with gay bars before them, specifically gay chat rooms were around for those who knew how to find them. A few operated as places, as one would expect, to chat — about theater, or cartooning, or politics, or drag pageants, what have you. But nearly all were used sooner or later for the same thing as their successor apps: hooking up. 

Early on, chat room users couldn't see what the guys they were chatting up looked like except by asking for a pic to be sent. Nor, unless a hometown were in the chatter's screen name, could they tell how many feet away the other guy was. I imagine that finding out that the other guy was all the way up at the North Pole would have been a deal-breaker for most men.

Santa, however, would have been at an advantage. Not only could he get to your place really, really quickly if he were up for it, he had already seen you while you're sleeping.

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Departing momentarily from the Christmas theme, this next cartoon comes with a trigger warning that it's about deadly serious criminal activity and might stir up unpleasant memories for some in the greater Milwaukee area. But it's a propos in light of the lionization — herofication, if you will — of  Luigi Mangione, Daniel Penny, and Kyle Rittenhouse.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 1, 1994

On November 28, 1994, a fellow inmate at the maximum security Columbia Correctional Institution attacked and killed notorious serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer and another inmate, Jesse Anderson. Anderson's case had received much local media attention; he had murdered his wife and sent police and media on a wild goose chase by claiming that two unknown black men had done it.

There were some people who promptly hailed Dahmer's and Anderson's killer, Christopher Scarver, as a hero. He was no such thing, and it surely must have grieved the family of Steven Lohan, the man he was convicted of executing in cold blood during a robbery at the Wisconsin Conservation Corps, to see Scarver lauded as such.

Would I be happier if Dahmer and/or Anderson were still languishing in prison today? No. Nor do I find any pleasure in that Scarver remains in prison, with two more murder convictions added to his sentence.

I had forgotten about this cartoon and only ran across it while trying to find the date of another cartoon I was considering for today's blog post. The original drawing of this cartoon might have gotten lost before I returned to the Post office with the following Tuesday's cartoon; it's not in my files and I can't recall pulling it out since. But since my mother was saving all my printed cartoons in a scrapbook I now have, here it is again.

Okay, folks: the trigger warning is no longer in effect. I'm going back to lighter material and you may resume reading. 

in UW-P Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 13, 1984

Here's a cartoon I did for the UW-Parkside student newspaper's last issue of 1984, as printed on its front page. 

The hearth in the cartoon is based on my parents'; in the living room between two bookcases, with a stone Viking ship mounted over the mantle. But that is not our dog.

I'm not sure why there's a teaser for "1982 reviewed" on the top of the page. I don't believe that the Ranger had any AARPgenarians on staff who still couldn't wrap their heads around it being 1984 already, let alone that it was soon not to be.

Well, that brings us to the end of our tour. Please return your tray tables to their upright position, make sure you have all your personal items with you, and have a happy holiday of your choice! 

Q Toon: Deck the Hallmarks

I've got time for just one more Christmas cartoon this year, so here goes:

Five years ago, my cartoon on this subject lampooned a Christian Nationalist trouble-maker who, in a fit of pique and self-promotion, had presented the Hallmark Channel with a petition demanding that it cancel production and broadcast of Christmas Holiday movies with LGBTQ+ central characters.

Controversy and outrage erupted in conservative circles after a November 15 interview with Hallmark Channel CEO Bill Abbot for The Hollywood Reporter's TV's Top 5 podcast. Abbot stated that he would be "open" to the idea of a gay-themed Christmas movie, although the channel has yet to produce one and has no immediate plans to do so. The channel is said to be releasing over three dozen Christmas-themed films this year, none with gay major characters.

Since then, Hallmark has added LGBTQ+ fare to its holiday offerings at every year, as has Lifetime. Netflix joined the party in 2021.  

Hallmark has cut back somewhat on making the Yuletide gay this year, however. I'm told there is only one holiday feature that includes a LGBTQ+ couple, and only as one plot line among several in a sequel about some sort of AirBnB/Vrbo/hostel where love is in the air ducts. 

That's one couple, in one movie, among 50 new Hallmark holiday movies this season. With a repressive regime in complete control in this country next year, I wouldn't expect any gay-friendly Hallmark treacle for Christmas, 2025.

So, of course, the Hallmark movie in my cartoon is completely made up, as are Ty Askew and Casey Rossera. The Catholic Censorship League would have a fit over any TV show depicting a closeted priest succumbing to the charms of an atheist guy under the pagan mistletoe; perhaps Ron Reagan Jr. and the Enforced Freedom from Religion folks would file their complaints as well.

Unless the professional complainer class decides it's not worth it to give the Christmas movie factories the free publicity of a formal protest. It's not as if any of what Hallmark, Lifetime, or Netflix has actually extruded for the holiday is apt to rival Shakespeare anyway. Or Dickens.

Whether The Bishop's Wife or Die Hard or Elf or Red One is more your style, we wish you a merry Christmas.

Q Toon: Prattville Prattle

Or, The Pastors' Prorogue.

In the interest of drawing about anything that has nothing to do with the impending Even More Corrupt Trump Administration, or the Republican campaign of persecution against transgender Americans, I present to you my annual Christmas Holiday Cartoon.

Prattville, Alabama, population just under 38,000, celebrated its annual Christmas Parade down East Fourth, Wetumpka, Northington, and Main Streets last Friday, with "lights, marching bands, dancers, candy, beads and trinkets" per the town's web page, but not without a bit of litigious drama.

The town's LGBTQ+ group, Prattville Pride, paid their $30 entry fee to have a float in the parade, only to have their application rejected by Mayor Bill Gillespie, Jr. Prattville Pride took the city to court to be allowed to march in the parade. With mere hours before the parade was to start, they won their case.

In his order, U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker of the Middle District of Alabama wrote: “While there are areas of unprotected speech, such as incitement of violence, the City makes no argument and provides no evidence that Prattville Pride has engaged in any speech or behavior that would remotely fall into an unprotected speech category. It is undisputed that Prattville Pride has complied with the City’s regulations.”

“The City removed Prattville Pride from the parade based on its belief that certain members of the public who oppose Prattville Pride, and what it stands for, would react in a disruptive way. But discrimination based on a message’s content “cannot be tolerated under the First Amendment,” the order continued.

Toleration, as it turned out, was in somewhat short supply.

Two participants pulled out of the parade after Huffaker’s order: St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, which initially backed out after Prattville Pride was included only to reverse course after the city’s ban, and Drive-In Park, the headquarters of “mobile movie evangelists” Drive-In Ministries.

“Unfortunately we are back to our original stance of having to forgo the parade since the pride float with their drag queen is back in it,” said Father Den Irwin, pastor at St. Joseph’s. “I am sincerely sorry for any inconvenience. We were trying to support the City after they boldly removed the float. However Prattville pride challenged the ruling in court and won.”

Drive-In Park said in a social media post it was “disappointed” that it had to pull out of the event.

“Our convictions at Drive-In have guided us to decide that we should not participate this year due to the inclusion of the Prattville Pride float,” the post read.

Congregants of St. Joseph and Drive-In Park who had put in so much work putting their floats together were no doubt crestfallen, although I'm pretty sure at least one of them has a parking lot they could parade around and around in.

As for the town's official parade, I have not been able to find any reports of any further disruption thereto. Neither fire nor brimstone has rained down upon beautiful downtown Prattville, according to the latest from the Weather Channel.

Just beads and trinkets.

Many Happy Returns

The reliable standby for American editorial cartoonists during the twelve days of Christmas is the Returns window at the old brick-and-mortor department store. Our politicians are home on vacation, the news desk is cranking out Best Of Last Year lists, and readers couldn't care less about elections in the Republic of Watsituia.

So I hope that I have at the very least come up with something more original than trying to return presidential candidates.

Or fruitcake.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Christmas break? I know not of this Christmas break. What is this Christmas break of which you speak?

By the way, Mike Peterson over at Daily Cartoonist linked to my Christmas 1923 post in today's Comic Strip of the Day of more recent Christmas comic strips, so here's a link back to him. Fun column today; go read it.

A propos his column, I can't speak for the Nib's reason for breaking up their multi-panel cartoons, but mine is partly to make my multi-panel cartoons more handheld-device-friendly... and primarily out of frustration at Facebook's habit of displaying everything but the top and bottom 5% of the cartoon when I link from there.

Bah, humbug, Facebook.

Merry Christmas to everybody else!

Since you've been so good this year, here's one more cartoon from Christmas, 1923.

"Christmas Greetings from All Our Little Boobs" by Rube Goldberg for McNaught Syndicate, Dec. 25, 1923

With apologies if you're reading this on a handheld device.

Christmas '23 Skidoo

This week's Graphical History Tour turns the clock back 100 years to find out what America's editorial cartoonists drew for their papers on Christmas Eve and Day, 1923:

"The Message of the Bells" by Oscar Chopin in San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 25, 1923

"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" remains one of my favorite Christmas songs long after the others have been played ad nauseam since Hallowe'en. It is a setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Civil War poem "Christmas Bells," written as his son Charley lay in hospital, having been shot during a skirmish in the Mine Run Campaign on December 3, 1863.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
....
And in despair I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

"When the World Sees Us at Our Best" by John T. McCutcheon in Chicago Tribune, Dec. 25, 1923

I can't say whether Oscar Chopin had the Longfellow poem in mind when he drew his Christmas Day cartoon, but I'm sure that many of his readers were instantly reminded of it. It was much more widely familiar then than now.

The Great War was receding in Americans' memories by 1923, and John McCutcheon kept his front page Christmas Day cartoon cheerful and optimistic.

"Enlightening the World" by Nelson Harding in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 24, 1923

As did just about all of his fellow editorial cartoonists. The American economy was booming, and nearly every cartoonist had drawn at least one cartoon in December (if not one per week) advising readers to get their shopping and mailing done early.

"Everybody Ready?" by Alfred W. Brewerton in Atlanta Journal, Dec. 24, 1923

Not everybody was consumed by crass commercialism.

"St. Louis Has Filled It" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post Dispatch, Dec. 25, 1923

Daniel Fitzpatrick was one of several cartoonists whose space on Christmas Day celebrated their newspaper's Christmas charity gift drives (the San Francisco Chronicle's Gustavo Bronstrup being another example). 

Written on the stocking is "Post-Dispatch Christmas Festival," an annual charity event since 1900. The newspaper's 1923 festival distributed "well-filled dinner baskets" to 3,000 "worthy families," as well as "pipes and tobacco for homeless men ... at municipal and benevolent lodging houses." There was entertainment for children, featuring mechanical waltzing dolls, ponies, and of course, Santa. Donors' names and contributions were all listed in the Sunday edition, although receipts by December 26 had fallen nearly $1,000 short of the budget.

"With Gifts Galore" by Douglas Rodger in San Francisco Bulletin, Dec. 24, 1923

Scottish-born Douglas Rodger was a recent immigrant to the U.S. Before coming to California in 1922, he had served in the British Army during World War I and the post-war occupation of Germany. His experience of the Great War, therefore, was considerably more immediate than that of the other cartoonists included in today's post. (Even that of McCutcheon, who did some wartime reporting from Europe.) Described as mischievous and good-natured, Rodger was haunted by wartime nightmares for decades afterward. He took his own life in 1962.

I don't want to end this holiday post on such a downer, so let's have some cute little kids or something like that.

"'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by William Ceperley in Davenport Democrat, Dec. 24, 1923

That's more like it, isn't it?

"Merry Christmas Every-Body" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register,  Dec. 25, 1923

Whew! All this merry-making is hard work.

"Please Let Me Sleep" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, Dec. 25, 1923

Oh, but now I'm just slapping old cartoons up on the internet without providing insight or adding value to them in any way! Well...

"Gone for Day" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Star, Dec. 25, 1923

See you next week.

This Week's Sneak Peek

No Santas or Scrooges or reindeer or sleigh bells in the pipeline this week, folks. No, indeedy. It's time for some good old-fashioned post-holiday physical fitness!

The Ghosts of Cartoons Past

Welcome to another Graphical History Tour. Let's rummage through my December cartoons from 2013, 2003, 1993, and 1983, shall we?

for Q Syndicate, December, 2013

I brought up Megan Kelly in this here blog the other day, quoting her fairly lengthy question to Chris Christie at last week's less-than-presidential debate. She accused him of being out-of-step with Republican orthodoxy and her own prejudices against transgender youth.

Ten years ago, Kelly was over at Fox Noise, whence she opined that everybody knows that Santa Claus can't possibly be Black because he's as Aryan as she is. Of course, we know from the historical record that the OG St. Nicholas was no such thing.

He was a Klingon. Qapla'!

for Q Syndicate, December, 2003

Once upon a time, I had an editor who objected to my depicting Santa Claus as gay. He was worried that it would offend readers' religious sensibilities. He had sold Q Syndicate by the time I drew this cartoon at the end of 2003, so I don't know if he would have had the same qualms about outing Old Man Time.

The editors of the Washington Blade really liked this cartoon, however, adding color and featuring it on the front page of their year-in-review issue. How I wish I had downloaded that version of the cartoon! (I had printed a screen grab of the page back then, but that piece of paper is a bit worse for wear twenty years on.) The Blade's colorizing job was an improvement over the original —cross-hatching really is no way to draw rainbow colors. But the grayscale image now in their archives is dark and muddy.

2003 was an extraordinarily good year for the LGBTQ+ community. An openly gay cleric, Rev. V. Gene Robinson, was elected Bishop Coadjudicator of the Episcopal Church New Hampshire Diocese. The original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the most popular program on Bravo, spawning further gay-oriented "reality programming." (Chip and Reichen were a gay couple on CBS's Amazing Race; Bravo's Boy Meets Boy was a gay version of The Bachelor with the catch that some of the supposed suitors were closeted straight dudes.)

Sadly, 2004 would prove to be a year of backlash, with President George W. Bush campaigning for reelection by pledging to enshrine opposite-sex marriage exclusivity in the U.S. Constitution — and America rewarding him by making him the only Republican presidential candidate in this century to win the popular vote.

UW-M Post, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 9, 1993

Skipping back another decade, I have fewer cartoons to choose from, and this may be the only one in today's post that hasn't appeared in my blog before. The student newspapers for which I drew always suspended publication in early- to mid-December for finals and winter break. Local newsmakers are busy with holiday business (as are local cartoonists), so I don't believe I drew anything for the Racine Journal Times during any of the Decembers featured here today.

The baby and the muralist in this cartoon would be millennials in their thirties today; I guess the parents might be millennials, too. If so, their family is spared having a generation gap.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Jan. 19, 1984

I drew this cartoon of the 1984 Democratic presidential candidates in December of '83 for the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Parkside after the last issue of the semester had been published, so it was held over until January.

Having a plethora of official whatnots of the Olympic games was a new development in 1984. Having sponsors actually started way back in 1908 (Soup maker Oxo sponsored the London Olympics that year), and Coca-Cola has been an official sponsor ever since the 1928 Amsterdam games. But by 1984, it seemed that every other commercial on TV boasted of being the official adhesive tape, motor oil, or hemorrhoid ointment of the Olympics.

Since we're back to December of 1983, I have to close with the Christmas break episode of my crude take-off of "The Maltese Falcon" starring thinly disguised characters from the comic pages.

At this point in my story, a police detective who looked suspiciously like Dick Tracy was interrogating an out-of-work fellow you might have sworn was Mike Doonesbury — note: Garry Trudeau had put his strip on hiatus at the end of January — when a bunch of characters from one of my all-time favorite strips suddenly interrupted:

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Dec. 15, 1983

I hope you'll check back before the holidays are over; but in case we miss each other, juHqu' qechmey!