A little over a month ago, Mayor Francis Slay announced his yearly call for submissions to design the St. Louis Holiday Card, or at least A Holliday Card…and while they have to say “holiday” for the diversity blah blah blah of the city, if you were thinking about drawing a Kwanza card you can just stop right now. We all know that’s just not gonna happen.
The top 10 winners get their cards hung up in City Hall so that grumpy people waiting in some god forsaken line to pay some fee they’d only recently heard of will see them and a begin to mentally pick out the inaccuracies in them, forgetting entirely that a child made it.
Here’s this year’s winner by fourth grader Tatyanna Jackson:
It’s a pretty good little drawing, with some quality work on the squirrel and baseball-man. However, that right side of the arch isn’t going to hold much weight for too long, and Fred Bird’s not going to go far trying to fly by kicking his little bird feet. Where the really art lies in this photo is what’s not there. No Pujols for one. They’re clearly in front of the arch, but no one’s been shot or stabbed, so did they move the Arch? Why aren’t there any snow flakes in front of or on the Arch itself? Does this card imply the artist shares the belief that the Arch controls the weather? Yes to probably all that stuff. Meaning they submitted a card with a scene where a cardinal and a baseball snowman excitedly compare their balls in front of an Arch that’s probably been moved to an undisclosed location, and emitting a low-range weather changing signal while a squirrel stands guard with a baseball bat.
This card is crazy messed up. There’s no way this card could have beat anything unless the runner up was a crayon drawing of a heroin addict breaking in to our car and taking the Hootie and the Blowfish CD I keep on the dashboard.
Here’s our submission that apparently didn’t make the cut:
What you’ve got here is a recently escaped felon holding up a guy with a knife while it snows just before the holiday tornado comes to take out have the state leaving nothing but little pieces of Joplin and candy canes in it’s wake. …and they’re in front of the Arch because you gotta but the Arch in these things to have any chance at winning. Oh, and it’s snowing. Happy Holidays!