So here's the "cartoon short" preceding the main feature of my Holiday Funfest comic... I actually had the idea to do this for a Holiday Funfest since last year, but then for 2007 I also wanted to do the Anna story. I didn't want to discard either idea, so I threw this in as a little side "bonus". The whole "turn it into a 'Night Before Christmas' poem parody" idea actually came just before I started working on it.

When I drew the horsey-pole (and it wasn't until after I drew this whole thing that I remembered that they're called stickhorses) in panel 3, I realized it looked a whole lot like a shot from a certain semi-annoying YouTube video that I adore, so I threw in that completely unrelated line "We're on a BRIDGE, Charlie!" Hooray for stupid inside jokes in webcomics that only web-savvy people get.

And here it is: the whole reason I had the idea for this comic in the first place. That image of the severed horse's head at the foot of that one playboy's bed in The Godfather still haunts me, so I decided to make something funny out of it. Originally I was going to put this together with MOTHER 2 characters, with Ness getting the stickhorse and the other Chosen Three getting fed up with his childish ways and taking the hatchet to his precious new toy; but I realized that it would be a liiiittle out-of-character for Ness (I dunno, maybe he'd be Mushroomized?), so I went with Lucas and Claus instead.