The Mountain’s Holiday Shirt Collection

“Dashing through the snow, taking all the meth, look at these T-shirts, they truly are the best, HO HO HO!”

~Official Holiday Jingle Of The Mountain

We love The Mountain, purveyors of the Three Wolf Moon shirt and Big Face Animal shirts.  We’ve taken it upon ourselves to show off their designs every time they release a new collection, because there’s nothing more fashionable than a giant both-realistic-and-cartoonish-at-the-same-time face bursting out of your chest, and we love wearing shirts that encourage us to spill booze and chicken grease on ourselves without feeling an iota of shame or remorse.

So do we have a treat for you.  With Thanksgiving in the rear view mirror, Christmas just a few short weeks away, and Hanukkah oh God Hanukkah has already started you might have to pay extra for overnight shipping to make sure you can order these shirts for your family in time, what better holiday gift can you hope for than the latest “available in size XXXL” offering from our favorite insane T-shirt makers?

The Mountain’s Holiday Shirt Collection

Delving through the catalog of The Mountain is a lot like developing a really intense but short-lived addiction to Robitussin, but without any awkward conversations with a Walgreens clerk about how you “can’t legally buy that much codeine” and “Ever since Breaking Bad caught on they’ve made us be super vigilant about this kind of stuff” and “I’m sorry but I have to report any suspicious purchases to the police.”  For example, look at their obsession with sloths.  Apart from the occasional SNL digital short, sloths don’t come up very often during “what’s your favorite animal” discussions.  Yes, their laziness is admirable for its blatant not-giving-a-shit-ness, but when was the last time you actively thought about the sloth as anything more than an abstract concept?  Well, if you work for The Mountain, apparently you think about sloths all the fucking time, because this is definitely not the first, and probably won’t be the last, time they draw a sloth and have it take up the majority of the space of a single-colored tie-dye-designed shirt.  That being said, it probably is the only time you’ll see them selling a sloth shirt where the sloth is hugging a candy cane, wearing a Santa’s cap with a Rudolph nose, while leering at you like a future sex offender.  That’s a little something we like to call “Christmas magic.”

Making Santa Claus a polar bear makes a lot of sense, because Santa lives on the North Pole, and so do polar bears, which you shouldn’t think about too much because once you imagine Santa’s sleigh being flown by magical polar bears, then you will be forever disappointed and jaded that the jolly old bastard went with reindeers instead.  It also makes perfect sense because Santa, like polar bears, would absolutely maul you to death without a moment’s hesitation or a twinge of guilt.  Try reading the subtext of T’was the Night Before Christmas sometime.  Duh.

Designer 1:  “Dammit, this time of the year is about more than just Christmas.  We have to be inclusive, and we have to be sensitive to other religious groups.  Hell, Hanukkah is going on as we speak, it would be downright cruel of us to deny our ardent Jewish fans the chance to open get a shirt from our company, The Mountain, as a Hanukkah gift.  Okay, so how can we respectfully and effectively portray the rich cultural history of the Jewish race?”

Designer 2:  “Hmm, that’s a bit tricky.  We’d need to find a way to delicately incorporate many traditions that span back thousands of years and…”

Designer 1:  “Never mind!  I got it!  Take a hamster, give it some of those long Jewish-looking side curls…”

Designer 2:  “I think they’re called pe’ot…”

Designer 1:  “Shut your goddamn face, I’m having a stroke of genius here, I will melt your skull with my mind.  Okay, then we give this hamster one of those spinning things…”

Designer 2:  “Dreidels?”

Designer 1: “Shut.  Up.  Genius at work here.  Anyway, give them those spinning tops, and then put the candle stand…”

Designer 2:  “It’s called a menorah”

Designer 1:  “You’re fired.  Anyway, slap on some curls, a spinning top, and a Jewish candle stand, and we’ve got ourselves a shirt!  Yes!  I’ve done it!”

It was only a matter of time before The Mountain replicated their Three Wolf Moon shirt with reindeer, but we didn’t realize that it was going to take such a dark turn.  Think about it—you have Rudolph and let’s-be-real-there’s-no-way-to-differentiate-between-the-other-eight-reindeer-so-fuck-it-we’ll-say-it’s-Donner-and-Dancer there pretending to do the reindeer equivalent of howling at the moon (it probably involves befriending gay dentists, at the moon) but in the background, Santa’s flying by in his sleigh, with a full contingent of reindeer, having abandoned three of his trusty steeds somewhere that is clearly not the North pole, if the giant sprawling pine trees are any indication.

We’re not here to speculate on the political infighting among the reindeer and Santa, but let’s just pretend for a moment that the other reindeers were jealous of Rudolph, since he’s by far the most famous of all the reindeers, despite being the most recent addition to the team.  Now remember, Santa Claus in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a total dick as well as a slave master who oversees his workforce with a rigid utilitarian worldview (see also:  the whole “elves can’t be dentists” policy).  What if he decided that Rudolph’s shiny nose wasn’t worth the resentment his fame was causing among the rest of his reindeer (after all, he was able to fly without any difficulty for dozens of years before Rudolph came into the picture during a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm)?  What’s to stop him from stopping around, say, Nova Scotia, and banishing Rudolph from the team to appease his disgruntled co-workers?  And if Santa’s exiling Rudolph, he’ll probably want to kick off Donner, since that is Rudolph’s father after all.  Donner’s been a member of the team since the beginning, so it’s only logical that someone else would complain about Donner’s exile (we’ll say, oh, Dancer) and would find himself similarly punished for daring to speak out to old Santa.

Then, Santa quickly picks up three replacement reindeer (plenty to choose from, considering that every reindeer grows up playing “reindeer games” which consists entirely of training future generations to pull Santa’s sleigh) and leaves these three to fend for themselves.  All they can do is forlornly look up at the moon and watch their past life leave them behind.

Jesus, The Mountain.  Why’d you have to go and do Rudolph like that?

Hey guys, remember grumpy cat?  That one cat that became a meme because he always looks miserable who got a movie deal because Hollywood totally forgot that the internet’s collective fifteen day attention span will have long forgotten him by the time they reach post-production?  Well now you can buy a shirt of him wearing a Santa hat and glasses and looking none too pleased about it!  Ha ha!   Each holiday grumpy shirt comes with three rescue cats with severe detachment issues and a letter from your next of kin telling you that they’d love to have you over for Christmas this year, but with Timmy’s cat hair allergy and all they don’t really have the space for you, but they can’t wait to see you at the next family reunion.  But you hang in there, buddy, and the wife wanted to thank you for the wool socks you knitted and sent over.  The whole family is wearing them right now, thinking of you.  Call any time.

Remember when we told you there wouldn’t be any other shirts of sloths wearing Santa hats looking at you unwholesomely?  We lied.  There’s no escaping the perverted Santa sloth.  No escape.

There are so many more shirts in the Holiday Collection that it would be a disservice to you, dear readers, if we stopped just here.  So we’ll come back next week with even more offerings from The Mountain, to really get you into the Christmas spirit.  Assuming you haven’t bought them all already.  Which is entirely possible.