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Ever since it was first published, Robert Ripley's Believe It Or Not! has had an enormous amount of imitators and rip-offs. Some of them were commissioned by large syndicates (and some small syndicates, like the one Jack Kirby worked for), and others were created by staff cartoonists for their local newspapers. One such strip with a local flavor was Our Own Oddities, created by Ralph Graczak, which appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch starting in 1940 and ended in 1991. The oddities covered were most often related to St. Louis, but quite a few were from elsewhere in Missouri or other midwestern states. All of them were submitted by local readers. There was quite a bit of space given to local produce that looked like various people and animals, or was just abnormally large. Readers generally mailed this produce directly to the newspaper offices, I imagine so that they could verify the truthfulness of the claim (though stretching the truth never seemed to bother Ripley much).

Here we have a selection of Christmas oddities, the strangest of which is the man who had received decorated coconuts from an anonymous source for 18 years, and one of which doesn't seem like an oddity at all, but is just a dog dressed up in a Santa costume. Perhaps that was more odd in 1966 than it is now.