New Year's Greetings

Since Mary Ann seems to be on a Fine Arts Visual Rhetorics kick at the moment, it seems okay to try to resuscitate "The New Year's Post That Never Happened," in which the Tenants spent several days going through the dusty steamer trunks in the attic of the North Tower to find old New Year's cards to use as the basis for a brilliant, if we do say so ourselves, meditation on Edwardian holiday iconography. But the New Year's Ball lasted until dawn this year, and when we got up there was football and ham, and the next thing we knew it was now.

Still, some of the cards are too good to waste, and it seemed a shame not to share at least one of our favorites:

While there are many, many appealing things about this, perhaps its best feature is that, while it obviously depicts a vegetable, it is not entirely clear exactly which vegetable it's supposed to be. A panel of experts has finally identified it as a spouted potato although there is some support for the idea that it might be an irregularly shaped kohlrabi. The Tenants' own private theory is that it is actually just a bad artist's rendering of Oscar Wilde.

In any of these cases, though, we're not entirely certain what the graphic representation has to do with the New Year. Any clarification you could give us would be greatly appreciated.