Christmas Greetings

This is the time of the year when people send out holiday greeting cards.  I’m pleasantly surprised by how many of these still arrive by old-fashioned mail.  E-cards seem so much less personal.  It’s always nice to see current photos of family and friends and get news about graduations, relocations, vacations and other momentous events.

Cartoonists do some of the best cards.  Many of these are beautifully designed and printed and I often wonder where they find the time to produce and mail them and still keep up with their deadlines.

Among my favorites were the annual greeting cards from the Browne family.  Hogan’s Alley magazine recently posted a collection of these, spanning the years from 1946 to 1993, on their web site.  To see them, click on the link below and scroll down to the heading, “The Christmas Card Art of Dik Browne.”

http://cartoonician.com/merry-christmas-from-hogans-alley/

If you are interested in the history of cartoons, I recommend subscribing to this informative publication.  A new issue just came out.

My father has also been making his own Christmas cards for decades.  In the mid-1960s, at the peak of the “Happiness is …” craze, he produced a 20-page booklet with original cartoons on the theme of, “A Merry Christmas is…”  Here are some pages from that card.

My youngest brother, Roger, was born a few years later.  The rest of us had to help by coloring in the “M” in “Merry” on each page of each card.

A few years ago we decided to revisit this idea in a Hi and Lois Sunday page.

Hi and Lois Sunday page, December 25, 2011.

Chance referenced the original Walker Christmas card for the design and did a great job with the calligraphy.

Next week we will feature a classic Hi and Lois Sunday page from Christmas past, so stay tooned.

– Brian Walker