Coro-ho-ho-navirus

He knows when you’ve been masking. He knows what is at stake

Like a lot of quasi-lame American white people drunk on holiday spirit, my family buys a new set of holiday pajamas every year and we all wear them on Christmas morning. I’m not just talking about my wife and my sons, I’m talking about my mom’s whole side of the family, including my mom, my aunts, my brother’s family, my cousins, their families, etc. It’s a social media thing now, but we’ve been doing this since I was a kid in the early- to mid-1980s. My mom and her sisters used to sew them for all of us, but when some of us became adults, the decision was made to just buy the pajama pants somewhere. Sometimes the pants were a sign of the times; the 2000 edition pants had the year and the red and yellow M&M mascots on them. Last year we all wore shirts with the emotionally-charged ancient Christmas celebration mantra “You serious, Clark?” Regardless, it’s a thing we’ve always done and we appreciate it both ironically and unironically.

So now it’s 2020, the most surreal year on record. We don’t get to see our extended family this year. It sucks. My grandparents are in really good health, but they’re still 85 and 90, so playing Russian roulette with their health isn’t something we’re willing to do, especially since some of their great-grandchildren are attending in-person elementary school. It’s especially frustrating, since this year, of all years, would be the one where we would most like to see our loved ones. So, with this in mind, my mom suggested that I design a t-shirt representing Christmas of arguably the worst year ever. And so I present Covid Santa.

I’m not going to hop up on a soapbox about the politics behind the spread of the pandemic here. Even though Ohio is a red state and I live in a red county, I’m fortunate enough to live in an area where being shamed for disobeying the recommended precautions of public health officials is more important to people than owning the libs. Nearly everyone in my community wears masks at the grocery store, and I consider that to be a litmus test signifying that no matter what take people have on the coronavirus here behind closed doors, no one wants to risk infecting someone else with a potentially deadly disease, and that’s good enough for me. I thought about that a lot while I was drawing this out, that we’re all in this together and that notion deserved a Coca-Cola-commercial-esque Santa design—I used a 2015 ad as a reference—even if the idea of the coronavirus raining down on us is pretty dark.

So this is our pajama shirt this year. It can be yours too! I started up a Threadless artist shop some time ago and then never really posted any designs to it until recently, but even now orders are rolling in after I posted it on social media in a bout of shameless self-promotion. They can put it on greeting cards and coffee mugs and stuff too if you’re in the market for that sort of thing, so feel free to check it out. I myself ordered these guys, one for my obnoxious pajamas and the other for another round of promotion at a later date (probably this week, since it’s December already):

Since I’ve made a little money off of this guy, I plan on design more t-shirts in time; you’ll be the first to know, One of Like Twenty People Who Visits my Website. Thanks for reading, and please consider staying home for the holidays this year if you haven’t already decided to.