Today, we look at how Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame dealt with the pressures of pretending to be good at Christmastime to get Santa Claus to give him presents.

It's our yearly Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar! Every day until Christmas Eve, you can click on the current day's Advent Calendar post and it will show the Advent Calendar with the door for that given day opened, and you can see what the "treat" for that day will be! You can click here to see the previous Advent Calendar entries. This year, the theme is A Comic Strip Christmas! Each day will spotlight a notable comic strip, and three Christmas-themed comics from that strip.

For the first day, I'll show you the image itself...

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The drawing for this year's Advent Calendar, of Santa Claus giving out presents to comic strip kids (although instead of a present for Charlie Brown, his dog, Snoopy, gets a present instead), is by Nick Perks.

Here it is in calendar form...

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And now, Day 1 will be opened (once opened, the door will feature an image from the featured comic strip)...

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WHAT WAS CALVIN AND HOBBES?

Calvin and Hobbes was a rarity, a newspaper comic strip that shut down while it was still very much in its prime. Bill Watterson decided that after a decade on the strip, he was finished, even though the strip was not only still highly critically acclaimed, but it was also still extremely popular. However, he decided that a decade was enough and just finished at the end of 1995, after launching in November 1985.

The series followed a young boy, Calvin, and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, who he sees as a walking, talking anthropomorphic tiger, but everyone else sees as just a stuffed toy that Calvin carries with him everywhere. Obviously, for a kid who has an elaborate friendship with his stuffed tiger, the key part of the strip was Calvin's imagination. Calvin was a wildly inventive little boy, but he was also a mischievous kid, as well. His parents were obviously long suffering, but you can often see where Calvin got his offbeat sense of humor from, as his parents could be sarcastic, as well.

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HOW DID CALVIN AND HOBBES HANDLE CHRISTMAS?

As would guess, for a kid who gets into as much trouble as Calvin does, Christmastime is a tricky time of the year. On the one hand, it is a time when he could get a lot of cool presents, but at the same time, it is also a time when he could possibly lose out on those presents due to his poor behavior around the year. He, of course, tries to be "good" at this time of the year, but it is hard to make the turnaround like that.

A clever thing that Watterson did with Calvin was also to allow him to pursue some philosophical ideas, from the perspective of a young kid, of course (after all, Calvin and Hobbes are both named after philosophers), and in this famous Christmas strip, Calvin debates the concept of what it MEANS to be termed "good." In other words, Calvin is not a murderer, and he does not start wars or anything like that, so in that context, does that mean that he is good because he is not EVIL? However, Hobbes argues with him (and, of course, since this is all courtesy of Calvin's imagination, he is arguing with himself) that it is not necessarily true that the absence of evil makes one good. This, of course, turns to Calvin wanting his friend to write him a reference letter for Santa, and Hobbes is definitely not going along with THAT!

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Click here to enlarge the image.

This next bit sees Santa Claus and his elves also debating exactly how to judge Calvin for the reasons partially noted above, but also just a general sort of legalistic sense. This was, again, during an era where famous trials were all the rage in the popular culture, and the notion of using legalities to get someone out of trouble would be pervasive in the culture to the point where someone like Calvin would clearly pick up on it, and so he is using that sort of thing to try to argue that he should not be treated as "naughty."

And, again, this whole thing comes down to the sheer imagination of Calvin, where he even tortures himself with this sort of thing...

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Click here to enlarge the image.

Finally, here's just a clever riff on the idea of Christmas poetry, like the famous "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," as Calvin comes up with a poem to explain why Santa Claus has decided to no longer punish the bad kids, but REWARD them. It is hard to write a really good humorous poem, and Watterson makes it look easy. Watterson is one of those really astonishing cartoonists where the art AND the story both could take control of the comic at any moment. Some strips lean one way or the other, but here, Watterson could lean totally on wordplay or he could dominate with brilliant visuals.

It is fascinating, too, to see how much Calvin's "naughtiness" is built into his personality that he decides that it seeps into his dreams in a way like this. Again, it all comes back to how offbeat Calvin's mind is, and how it works in delightfully twisted ways like this crazy poem. Of course, the visuals are amazing, too, seeing Santa, in effect, "break bad" as he sides with the kids like Calvin (and reveals that he is secretly bored by the "good" kids, as something that Calvin probably has long believed).

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Click here to enlarge the image.

This is a bit less of a reader-interactive feature, but if you can think of a really good Christmas strip by a notable comic strip, feel free to e-mail me about it at brianc@cbr.com, and maybe I'll use that strip for a future example for one of the other 23 incoming strips!