What a great way to start this post. How many of you ladies said, “Oh, yeah” when you saw it?
There are many paintings on the internet showing Bogey, Marilyn, Elvis, and James Dean together in scenes like at a bar or around a poker table. This is the only one that has Elvis and Marilyn in Santa outfits.
I guess the scene is a movie theater – one that’s big enough to have a Christmas tree and presents in it.
Technically, this photo was not taken at Christmas. But it’s nice to see Graceland in winter.
There’s no snow in this side shot of Graceland, but it does show the large manger scene.
The most common shot of a Christmas tree in Graceland is this white artificial one with red balls in the living room.
But the next photo shows how the Graceland dining room is decorated now. You can’t tell if the tree is real or artificial, but it is covered with a variety of lights and ornaments.
I’m guessing they wouldn’t showcase tree decorations that weren’t there while Elvis was around. Or would they?
I love the looks on the young elves’ faces.
I don’t have information on the creator of this Elvis as Santa picture. It’s pretty good, but check out a very different Elvis Claus.
This takes a little explaining. It’s the artwork for the cover of my not yet published book called “Elvis Claus.” We see an older Elvis with a beard that had turned grey over time. After years of avoiding contact with people, he ventures out wearing festive Christmas apparel, and the people who meet him say he looks like both Elvis and Santa. He adopts the nickname Elvis Claus, which eventually gets shortened to Elvis. So, we have Elvis hiding in plain sight as Elvis.
As for this image, it is the work of a great graphic artist. I picked out the Elvis photo for her to age, as well as the other one showing the hat, beard, and coat. By the way, it was a promo photo of Tim Allen in “The Santa Claus 2”
I gave this one a title — “The Elves Have Left the Building.”
I like the design and colors of this. I may use it again as the title image for a future blog post.
You will recognize this as the cover of Elvis’ 1971 Christmas album. It looks OK, I guess. But they also made a promo piece that blows up the Elvis snowman, and it’s not so good.
See what I mean?
Now, let’s take a look at some Elvis Christmas tree ornaments.
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I think this is pretty cool. Years ago I cropped off the name of the creator. Now I wish I knew, so I could give her a shout-out. Although it is not a real ornament, I think EPE would have a winner if they came out with a line of Christmas ornaments done like this.
Now, here are some real ones produced during the early days of Elvis’ career.
For some reason, quite a few early ornaments were a TV with Elvis on the screen.
I like how this one plus two of those above come with tiny rabbit-ears.
Modern day concepts are interesting, too. How about an Elvis T-shirt ornament?
Or a mini Elvis lunchbox ornament?
There’s a lot going on with this one. Elvis in front of jailhouse bars dangles down, as do the three lower things.
Not a bad Christmas wish list.
This image of Elvis in a Santa hat is done in a style called pointism painting. It’s different, but I’m not that crazy about it.
I heard on the news that yesterday (December 20) was National Ugly Christmas Sweater Day.
So, I decided to see if there were any Elvis sweaters out there with this theme. It turns out that there are over 20 ugly Elvis Christmas sweaters for sale, but most of them aren’t really so ugly. Next year maybe I could do a review of them, like I do for Elvis T-shirts.
I could see me wearing this one, except it costs $60, so that prices it out of my reach.
Elvis had the unique ability to joke around and still look super-cool.
Merry Christmas, Everybody
Phil Arnold
