Christmas Puck

W. E. Hill's cover for the Christmas 1913 issue of Puck places a hapless, wide-eyed snowman center-stage, gripping a cane and wearing a jaunty straw boater. Flanking him symmetrically, two fashionably drawn young women in white-and-red pierrot costumes raise sprigs of mistletoe above his head, their expressions mischievous and inviting. The snowman's furrowed, anxious face—frozen in comic dread at the implied kissing obligation—carries the joke entirely. The composition is decorative rather than political, reflecting Puck's late-era drift from sharp partisan satire toward sophisticated seasonal entertainment. Hill's figures are rendered in the clean, poster-influenced style he developed before his long career at the Tribune. No ethnic caricature is present. The price line reads ten cents; the masthead locates publication at the Puck Building, New York.