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Smokey Stover is back this year, now trying to hire someone to play Santa for his son. Now, I don't think the comic is saying that if you hire any random man off the street with a long beard that they will definitely turn out to be a wanted safe cracker and house breaker, but it does seem safer to give the job to someone you know. Besides, it seems like there are more men with beards these days, so it shouldn't be too hard to find a friend or neighbor to do it. There have also been major advances in costume beard technology, so even if you don't have a beard, there are ways to more easily trick your kid into believing it.

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Corky just loves using his hatchet. Whether it's for cleaning up after Christmas or getting a tree from a tree farm, he'll just find a way to use it even if he doesn't need to. Maybe instead of getting trees using credit he should get a job cutting them down. I bet Mr. Ruff would hire him.

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Ella Cinders by Bill Conselman and Charles Plumb is another example of a comic strip that started out with a very particular premise but that drifted away from that premise as it continued. It's one of those strips that I don't think the creators thought they would be doing for a long period, so they pitched the idea as something that would have a clear ending point. However, as it happened, the strip just ended up being popular enough that it continued long past that point.

As the title of the strip and the name of the main character may suggest, it began as a 1920s retelling of the story of Cinderella, though instead of Ella wanting to meet a prince at a ball, she wants to be a Hollywood star and meet an agent at a beauty contest. She does end up going to Hollywood and has various adventures there, though she never becomes a star. She just ends up living there with her husband Patches and has different interactions with various members of her family. The strip eventually turns its focus to those other characters, and as we see in this particular strip, often she's not even in it.

This strip appears to be part of a dream sequence of some kind where Ella's younger brother Blackie visits the North Pole. It's interesting that it shows Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, and Saint Nicholas as three separate people. It's also interesting to note that in this operation, instead of any of them going down the chimney, they fire the presents themselves down the chimney with varying levels of precision. I guess this year if there was something on your Christmas list that you didn't get you might want to check on your roof.

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Caroling has always been one of those things that seems like a good idea when you see it in movies or on TV but never really works out the way you want in real life. I remember going caroling with my youth group when I was young, and while I enjoyed the singing, I felt like the visit and the gift we brought was more meaningful to the people than the songs we sang. Maybe they enjoyed it, but I feel like some people would rather skip the unsolicited singing and just invite people in for a chat. Then, if they asked for it you could leave them with a song, but if they didn't you could just leave them with a hug and a warm feeling. That said, maybe these days people would be more likely to just sing outside and not go in given certain safety concerns.

In this case, a visit from a nice dog on Christmas Eve is probably more enjoyable for the woman than hearing people sing, especially when you add in what I imagine is questionable guitar playing. Besides, given that Uncle Elby describes her as "that attractive widow" implies what he really wants is to win her affection more than to make the season brighter for her.

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Annibelle, created by Dorothy Urfer, was a comic strip that seemed to care more about its look and feel than its actual content. The jokes, as they were, generally centered around the social lives of women and how they appear to each other in society, and the gossip about other women in their social circles. These tended to be women on the upper crust of society, whose lives were not particularly relatable to the general public. Still, the artwork by Urfer, and later by Virginia Krausmann, was some of the best on the newspaper page. The women and their lives looked glamorous and exciting, so it didn't matter that what they talked about was vapid and uninteresting, and even though it may be a life you would never have it was a way to dream about having it.

This particular strip is a good example of the gossipy nature of the humor. The joke doesn't necessarily seem to be that Annibelle finished all her shopping early, but her cat messed up her handmade sweater, so she has to go buy her brother something at the last minute. It seems to matter more that her friend caught her shopping at the last minute and will probably tell all of her friends that Annibelle bragged about being so smart, but it turns out she's just like the rest of us and was putting up a front. How embarrassing!

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Mickey Finn by Lank Leonard is a comic strip that has been described by comic strip historian Allan Holtz as "so low-key as to be practically no key at all", but I think that was part of its appeal. The titular Mickey is an Irish-American policeman who does police work, but never really gets into anything too exciting or dangerous, and has family and romantic drama, but never anything too serious. It's one of those comfort strips that, were it still around, would be much like a Rex Morgan or Mary Worth, endlessly rehashing the same stories year after year and that people never actually read but appreciate that their local newspaper still carries them. Besides, Charles Schulz is reported to have said that it was his father's favorite comic strip. What more do you need?

So yes, the joke in this particular strip is old and tired (man refuses to give the same thing to his girlfriend for Christmas that he gets her every year, looks for something different, and finally settles on the same old thing), and it was probably already old by the time it was used in this strip in 1937, but that's okay. I think the dialogue between Mickey and Uncle Phil is great, and Mickey carrying around a bundle of presents with him as they go from store to store is a very fun visual. Plus, I just love the expression on the perfume lady's face. I imagine this is how all retail workers feel during Christmas shopping season.

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Harold Teen by Carl Ed was one of the first comic strips to feature a main character and cast who were all teenagers. Starting in 1919, long before characters like Archie and his Riverdale friends were around, Harold was showing people what it was like to be a teen in the early 20th century. Ed claims that there weren't any comic strips that were doing that at the time, and I'm inclined to believe him. At the very least there weren't any that reached the height of popularity that Harold Teen did, or spawn nearly as much merchandise as it did. Most comic strips at that time dealing with younger folk were centered around young children, but after Harold Teen the popularity of strips about teenagers grew quite rapidly. It was a pioneer to be sure, if not creating a genre of strip then at the very least popularizing it.

Here we see one of Harold's best friends, Shadow Smart, trying to think of a Christmas present to get the local girl all the guys have a crush on, Lillums Lovewell, and coming up with enterprising ways of getting the money to buy it. Much like Corky, although he does earn the money he needs, he unfortunately spends all of it on soda and never buys her anything. This will probably not be a big deal to her, as I imagine she has plenty of suitors and will be receiving a large number of gifts from them, and therefore won't really mind not getting a gift from Shadow. Still, one would hope that in the future Shadow, like Corky, would learn to budget his money better.

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Here we have Corky doing his Christmas shopping a year after the the comic I posted yesterday, and it looks like he has learned a thing or two from his past experience. This time, he didn't spend all of his money on candy and soda, but just enough that he didn't have enough to give to the Salvation Army Santa. Maybe in another year or two he'll learn how to budget everything properly.

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It's often hard to find information about topper strips (see my post from a couple days ago about Josie), but it's made a bit easier when the character in the topper is also a character in the main strip. Corky is the son of the main characters of the strip it's a topper for, Gasoline Alley, and regularly appeared in that strip as well as his own. In this way the topper became an extension of the main strip, rather than just an accessory for it. This didn't happen often with toppers, but Ernie Bushmiller also did it with Phil Fumble, and E.C. Segar did it with the various Thimble Theater characters that appeared in its toppers. There were probably others, but on the whole it wasn't really done, as the topper was seen as fairly disposable due to the fact that newspapers could just drop it if they wanted to save space.

I've written about Corky before, but Frank King's Gasoline Alley and its characters are always a great source for holiday cheer. Here we see Corky spending all of his money on candy and soda and not buying presents for his family, and then trying to use Santa Claus as a scapegoat. I don't know exactly how all the naughty or nice business works, but I have a sneaking suspicion that doing something like that is likely to get you a lump of coal in your stocking. I don't think Santa takes kindly to being used as a fall guy.

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Charles Addams is of course best known for his series of New Yorker cartoons, The Addams Family, but for a short while he also did a newspaper comic panel known as Out Of This World. It wasn't really that different from what people had come to expect from Addams, and had the same macabre humor as his magazine cartoons, although there are also some fantasy and science fiction elements mixed in. The panel unfortunately only ran from 1955-1957.

Here we have what appears to be a robot doing his Christmas shopping and looking to buy something for his... uh... father, I guess. There are many theories from various people about how we will know when an artificial intelligence is really sentient and thinks for itself, and isn't just parroting its programming. I think wanting to buy its creator a gift for an important holiday might qualify. Sure, the scientist could have just programmed the robot to go to the store and buy him a gift, but I like to think it was actually the robot's own idea.