Puck Christmas 1909

Gordon Grant's cover for Puck's Christmas issue presents a gift box overflowing with the faces of roughly a dozen young women — the magazine's stock type of the idealized "Puck girl" — tumbling forward like bonbons from festive tissue. Holly, mistletoe, and a crimson ribbon frame the lower right. No satirical target appears; this is pure seasonal promotion, offering the magazine itself as the perfect holiday gift. The women are rendered in the soft, conventionally pretty style Grant favored, ethnically homogeneous and genteel — the normative white femininity that Puck consistently used to signal aspirational middle-class taste to its readership, contrast to the ethnic caricature it deployed elsewhere in its pages for comic or political ends.