A collection of six short stories moving chronologically through the holiday period, each story in Merry Fucking Christmas follows a different character who, hopefully, is experiencing a worse holiday than you; whether you're disenfranchised by the normally festive holiday or simply stuck with an annoying family. For the cover, the author desired a design that was more tasteful than the words in the title, believing that the artwork should not scream obscenities alongside it. To find inspiration, our cover cooks turned to the final headliner story, 'Merry Fucking Christmas', which takes place in a large colonial home where the protagonist, Jeannie, struggles to prepare dinner for her extended family whose members span the spectrum from merely ‘off’ to fanatical and racist. Jeannie’s son takes up hunting small animals out of boredom and brings them home, eventually turning family dinner into a gory slapstick feast. After reading the story, our cover cooks recommended a blunt, blatant design approach indicative of the book's tone as opposed to a more tasteful and refined approach. As such, the final cover featured an irreverent image that hints to the bloody end in the story, balanced with artistic execution of hand drawn illustration and lettering. The back cover design also screams with bold Christmas-related words placed on sales-inspired tags.

To create a cover design that overflowed with a mixture of comedy and tragedy, our cover cooks blended a 3D model of a collapsed man with a photograph of a retro TV. This technique allowed our cover cooks to perfectly adjust the character’s pose and provide the illustration with a realistic look. While the man in his underwear crushed by the TV appears amusing, the test pattern on the screen reveals the seriousness of the situation. The offbeat font and CMYK color palette desperately seek a revival of 1980s Hollywood sitcom graphics.