Christmas Puck

A young woman looks out from beneath an enormous red-and-green hat, standing waist-deep in a screen of white mistletoe in the snow. Gordon Ross draws her in flat, poster-bright color inside an ornamental frame, a small elf tucked into each lower corner. CHRISTMAS PUCK is lettered across the top in outlined capitals. Set beside the painterly holiday portraits of the same years, this cover shows the other road magazine art was taking: hard contour, patterned fill, decoration over depth. The mistletoe becomes a woven green-and-white field rather than a stray sprig, and the whole surface flattens into design. Ross gives the season a graphic, almost heraldic look, the beautiful woman turned into an emblem of the number as much as a figure in it.