Ghosts of Christmases Past
Back in the day, back when it was just me, Mrs. Perils and the batshit crazy, cannibis-addled cat, Natasha, that we dragged out here from Bowling Green, Ohio when we moved here in 1974, we took to making our own Christmas cards. Mrs. Perils is a gifted cartoonist, and we had some fun in the design and execution.
We started simple - pen & ink drawings that we would have Xeroxed, and that Mrs. Perils would then hand-color individually. This one was from a time when we bicycled nearly everywhere we went, and was apparently from our pre-helmet days. It has sort of a New Yorker quality to it, doncha think? We wanted to place ourselves emphatically in our new city, co-opting its familiar iconography. It bore the caption “Christmas is nearly upon us”:
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A few years later, we discovered color Xerox. We also discovered ourselves possessed of a young boy-child, and I was conveying that maybe I hadn’t left Ohio and my OSU Marching Band roots entirely behind:
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This next one (I’m not sure these two are chronological) depicts an after-midnight sorta-Nordstrom’s display window replete with:
- a flasher elf
- a chainsaw-wielding elf
- a slutty hooker elf reclining on a divan
- a couch-potato elf being harangued by his harpy-elf mate
- an elf Christmas tree festooned with fishhooks, hatchets, switchblades and a mousetrap
We were most certainly trying too hard to nudge ourselves toward the nether end of the Sacred/Profane scale.
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Mrs. Perils will tell you that I goaded her into subject matter that would not have occurred to her unbidden, but I submit that an evil and irredeemable genius (I love that in a woman) revels in the rendering of these details.
There are more of these around here somewhere. I’ll scan & post them if I find them.
