The Coats Have a Merry Christmas

A Sunday comic strip featuring the Coat family—anthropomorphic goats engaged in chaotic Christmas preparations. Santa Claus arrives bearing gifts, triggering a series of slapstick mishaps: a drum is broken, a wheel explodes, and one character becomes trapped in a barrel. The final panel shows the family gathered together, exchanging gifts and cigars amid the wreckage. The strip employs sequential panel layout with speech balloons, establishing narrative continuity across nine frames. The artist uses pen-and-ink crosshatching and exaggerated proportions typical of early newspaper comics, where Sunday pages and dailies served as the primary medium for visual storytelling before the comic book format emerged. Animal character strips were popular vehicles for domestic humor and holiday themes in the 1900s.