This cover from the 1956 Christmas issue of The Green Gander, Iowa State’s student humor magazine, features the exaggerated Green Gander mascot surrounded by stylized characters in a limited red-green-black palette. The illustration reflects the playful, seasonal, and culturally expressive visual language of 1950s student publications.
The 1956 Christmas cover of The Green Gander, Iowa State’s student humor magazine, provides a vivid lens through which to examine mid-century campus culture. Using a cultural analysis method grounded in ideology and representation, this essay explores how the cover’s imagery, color choices, and caricatured figures reflect the values, humor, and social norms of student life in the 1950s.
The cover centers on the exaggerated Green Gander mascot, a chaotic and humorous bird whose lively posture embodies the magazine’s irreverent tone. Surrounding the
mascot are playfully rendered student figures engaged in seasonal activities, their bodies stylized in a manner typical of 1950s cartooning. The simplification of forms and expressive exaggeration aligns with the era’s popular illustration styles found in mid-century advertising and comic art. This embeddedness in mainstream design trends signals the magazine’s desire to position itself within a contemporary cultural conversation.
Color plays an essential ideological role. The limited palette, primarily red, green, and black, evokes the familiar iconography of Christmas. This deliberate use of traditional holiday hues reinforces a shared cultural identity among students, many of whom would have associated these colors with home, family, and seasonal ritual. At the same time, pairing these colors with absurd characters introduces a comedic tension: the sacredness of holiday imagery is disrupted by humor and chaos, reflecting the magazine’s ethos of playful subversion.
From a representational standpoint, the cover also reflects mid-century gender norms. Male characters often appear as active, central, or comedic drivers of the scene, while female figures tend to be stylized in ways consistent with 1950s American visual culture, emphasizing cuteness, grace, or predictability. Although such portrayals may seem inconsequential, they reveal the subtle ways student publications reproduced the gendered expectations of the period.
The Christmas issue’s cultural function extended beyond humor. It acted as a communal artifact that shaped student identity, offering shared jokes, familiar aesthetic cues, and a sense of belonging during a time when collegiate traditions played a major role in campus life. The blend of satire, seasonal symbolism, and visual exaggeration encapsulates the cultural atmosphere of ISU in the 1950s.
