Christmas gifting in my immediate family is a slightly off-kilter affair.

Being that I work hours that leave me unable to do much in the way of in-person shopping, that task has been "contracted out" to my younger brother, who is home full-time, being an art freelancer/behind-the-scenes person at Angry Viking Press,  jasoncanty's outfit. Being of limited income as a result, my parents and I (co-owners of a two-family house we occupy as a single) jointly fund his and my gifts to our parents and he goes about the task of gathering them. So sometimes I don't know exactly what's being given in my name.

Coming home from work on Christmas Eve, (an assigned half-day) I was able to stop by a local Walgreens on a spur-of-the moment inspiration to look for Christmas cards for my parents and brother. Being unsure of how many gifts they were getting "from me", my plan was to supplement these with a cash gift enclosed within said cards. Ultimately I only found one card that fit my "tradition" of picking out funny cards, which you see at the top of the pic (a minor miracle in itself being this was after 6pm on 12/24). The other two cards, alas would have to be generic "money/giftcard" cards.

In a fit of artistic inspiration, I came up with the idea of customizing these two with drawings of the manic-looking critter on the cover of the first card. After getting home and promptly falling asleep post-dinner, I was awakened by my usual 6am alarm clock on Christmas Day. Being that there are no starry-eyed kids under my roof to initiate the gift-distribution process at the crack of dawn, I had time to grind out a pair of digital drawings of this manic-looking critter of poorly-defined species, in poses befitting of the generic cards I was customizing, printing them out on cardstock and affixing them inside the cards under the default text where one's signature would go, before heading upstairs to perform the normal Christmas morning present pass-outs. Within all three cards was my supplemental gift--a crisp C-note and touch of humor.

Technical:
Not much to say here (HA!). I still don't know what species Hallmark used for the character illustration on the card shown up top, but I think I did a credible job of re-creating the character in a more toned-down fashion. Certainly the original artist would recognize him (especially since I included the original artwork in case this pic gets reposted somewhere that Google might index it). Both pics were digitally drawn in the same Krita document, after completing the first portrait, I simply turned off those layers and added some new ones on top, referencing the first pencil sketch to keep the two roughly the same size. While I didn't include images of the cash card covers, I did reference their design on the stockings the character is depicted holding, with the "HO HO HO" running down the front of the first, and the poinsettia/mistletoe graphic on the second, not to mention the attempt to place the texture of the second card behind the drawing going inside it. Not a perfect match, but still effective.

Digital drawings done in Krita 4.1.7, images composited with descriptive text in Micrografx Picture Publisher 10. 13 layers in Krita (44MB), 19 layers in MPP (50MB)