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Puck, v. 60, no. 1553

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Christmas Puck

Illustration shows rows of toys, dolls, teddy bears, soldiers and drummers, and trees.

Comments and Context

The annual Christmas issue of Puck in 1906 was given to Frank A. Nankivell for its cover design. In recent years the holiday issues of the magazine were given to decorative or poster-like images. It made the special themes more widely attractive to readers and advertisers, especially downplaying politics and partisanship. These issues usually were more pages — often 32 or 48 pages instead of Puck‘s usual 16 — and carried more color cartoons and advertising.

Nankivell was born in Australia, where he drew cartoons for various publications before he moved to Japan, where he drew for the Tokio Puck (no relation to Joseph Keppler’s New York Puck), then drawing for newspapers and magazines in San Francisco and finally Puck in New York.

A Christmas joke with a point to it

In the interior of a frontier cabin, a long table is set for a Christmas turkey dinner. Around the table are seated several people, some of whom are surprised to discover an arrow stuck in the turkey, shot by a Native standing outside the open door of the cabin.

Comments and Context

In Puck Magazine’s holiday issues — Easter, Midsummer, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas — the publishers generally yielded space routinely reserved for political cartoons to thematic, seasonal, or purely humorous subjects.

The 1906 Christmas number was no exception, and Puck‘s Austrian import Carl Hassmann was counted on to provide superb-poster like artwork in addition to clever ideas. This center-spread cartoon, in fact, is not very clever or funny — a Native American startles Colonial revelers at dinner with an arrow aimed at the holiday turkey — but does tell us something about the times of the cartoon’s creation. The Pilgrims are rather more up-to-date than their 1600s versions, especially the women, and the Indian is not depicted as a savage but rather a friendly prankster.