We Hate the Holidays

Offered on the Topps website on November 21, 2019 as On Demand release number 22, We Hate the Holidays arrived with a forty-dollar price tag and an intended seven-day ordering window. Collectors took far less time than that to clean out the stock, snapping up the entire print run within three days with help from an allowance of fifty sets per order. When sales closed, the print run finished at 1,304 copies, a tally that eclipsed the previous high-water mark set by the GPK x NYC Takeover collection and established a new sales record for the line's online offerings. The rapid pace of orders brought the sale to an early close well before the scheduled week was up.

The core checklist gathered twenty stickers built around ten paintings split into traditional "a" and "b" twins, dropping the third "c" name variations that had accompanied earlier online sets that year. Rather than inventing brand-new kids, the paintings thrust vintage favorites into seasonal disasters, dividing the brushwork among Joe Simko, Brent Engstrom, Joe McWilliams, and David Gross. Simko supplied a Thanksgiving mishap for Cranky Frankie, while longtime figures like Adam Bomb, Up Chuck, Bony Joanie, and Nasty Nick turned up in holiday indignities of their own. All ten paintings centered on holiday mashups featuring classic characters.

Each pack supplied the complete base run alongside six parallels, divided into three Green, two Red, and a single Snowflake card, an arrangement that left the Snowflake run at just sixty-five copies for each subject. In place of extra sticker cards, Topps tucked in one foldable 5x7 poster per set, pulling from ten designs that reproduced the art from the "a" checklist. Hand-drawn sketch cards fell in one out of every two sets, finished by seventeen artists including Shane Garvey, Neil Camera, and Jason Crosby, but collectors who pulled one discovered that the illustration backs gave the release an alternate title, We Hate Holiday Season.