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I've posted some Christmas Bill Holman art before, but this is the strip he's the most known for, Smokey Stover. It was a popular comic that ran for roughly 40 years, and featured a firefighter, the titular Smokey, as its main character. Hollman was known to put various side gags in the background of each panel which were usually plays on words, as can be seen in several panels here. At Christmas time there would always be a sign somewhere saying "notary sojac." According to Holman, this was a reference to the Gaelic phrase "Nodlaig Sodhach," which means "Merry Christmas." Others in this particular strip include the valet Forge, a foreign policy, and hoss scents. This may be what made the strip so popular; even if you didn't laugh at the final punchline, there was at least something in one of the panels that might make you grin.

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Emily and Mabel started out as a single panel gag strip by Mike Angelo called Funny Angles. While the strip didn't start out with any recurring characters, Angelo started featuring the twin older ladies Emily and Mabel more and more as the years went on, and eventually renamed the panel after them. The strip centered around the titular characters doing their best to woo various men, usually unsuccessfully. They are always shown together, and I'm not sure if it's ever made clear which is Emily and which is Mabel, but I guess it doesn't really make a difference.

Here we see Emily or Mabel on an impromptu date with a mall Santa. It's interesting to note that often in the strips there is only one man that's the object of the ladies' affection, which makes me wonder whether they just happen to go everywhere together, even dates, or if they are competing with each other for the same man, or if there's some kind of bigamy thing going on. I'm not sure. Hopefully Mabel or…

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I posted some Mr. and Mrs. strips last year, from when Clare Briggs was doing it. Here we have one from the later, Arthur Folwell and Kin Platt years. I find it interesting that the art here focuses mainly on the faces of the two main characters and the new friends that they meet, without doing anything to establish a sense of place or position relative to anything else. However, in doing so it captures the feeling of cramped discomfort that you would have while carrying a bunch of packages through the big city while trying to find your car. It's amazing what you can do with some snappy dialogue and facial expressions.

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I've posted Smitty Christmas comics twice before, but those were from some of his earlier days and focused on Smitty himself. Here we see Smitty's younger brother Herby trying his best to be a Dennis the Menace, but being foiled by his own desire for Christmas presents. It's a clever way to get Herby to be good, but I wonder if they'll stay blank the whole month or not. It would kind of spoil the surprise, but it would be interesting to slowly add things to the "hidden" lists to give Herby some extra incentive. Maybe some of the things could get crossed out, too, to really make him wonder.

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Penny, created by Harry Haenigsen, was a fairly long running comic strip about a teenage girl, the eponymous Penny. Haenigsen created the strip in 1943 at the suggestion of the wife of the New York Herald Tribune's publisher. It seemed she was tired of seeing so many comic strips about boys, and asked for one about a girl. Haenigsen was already drawing a comic strip about a teenage boy, called Our Bill, so he did something similar, but with a girl. Both strips are about as authentically mid-century teenager as you can get, and Haenigsen did his level best to keep them that way. To make sure the slang terms he used in the strip were current, he hung out at soda fountains and often invited groups of neighborhood kids to his house on weekends. He even invented some of his own slang terms rather than use ones that he knew were out of date. He was assisted on art duties by Bill Hoest, who took up a majority of the workload after Haenigsen sustained a serious injury in 1…