Mayor of San Juan wishes you a very taxidermy Christmas
“May this Christmas light your dream” reads the official Christmas Card of Mayor Jorge Santini of San Juan, Puerto Rico, which has gone viral. (Photo: El Nuevo Dia Facebook)
It’s the Christmas card that has baffled the Twitterverse and the gift that keeps on giving in Internet memes. Every year, Mayor Jorge Santini from San Juan, Puerto Rico sends an official Christmas card featuring his picture-perfect family to his constituents. Only this time, the Santinis went for something more … wild, posing in front of a stuffed leopard devouring an equally dead gazelle.
The bizarre setting was not a local taxidermy shop but rather the city’s new Wildlife Museum, which the proud mayor intended to promote with the photo to increase visits this holiday season (five versions of the card were distributed, including one with the Santini family posing next to stuffed penguins and another one next to a statue of an elephant.)
In a matter of hours, parodies were all over Facebook (Santini and Chipmunks), Tumblr (Santini Family Nights, featuring the family posing in front of bloody encounters from Rambo to Sumo wrestlers), foreign newspapers, and an oh-so-coveted opening placement on Anderson Cooper’s “The RidicuList” segment.
But no one can seem to agree: is it a jaguar or a leopard? A gazelle, an antelope, or an impala? A visit to the museum may be in order.
