Instead of a white-elephant swap, in place of the mistletoe and as an alternative to a secret Santa exchange, we’ve got a different type of present: sharing some of our most fun wintertime photos from the Playboy Archives. (On second thought, we’ll still hang the mistletoe.)

One of our favorite finds over the past few years is this 1968 VIP magazine cover shoot by Bill Arsenault. Readers may recognize the photo above as the Playback selection from the November/December 2017 PLAYBOY; we were happy to have a hand in finally bringing it to publication. Expertly staged and effortlessly natural, the photo is perfectly Playboy.

Playmate Lenna Sjööblom, above, is best known for her November 1972 Centerfold, which has had a long life beyond of the pages of PLAYBOY: The well-lit photo found its way to USC engineers and was integral in the development of digital-imaging processing. For a few winters Sjööblom, who learned to ski at a young age in her native Sweden, worked as a Bunny at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club-Hotel in Wisconsin. This photo of her, taken there by Dwight Hooker in 1973, brings new meaning to the term bunny hill.

Though plenty of Playmate pictorials evoke the end of the year by way of snowy ski-lodge themes or cozy fireplace settings, sometimes we discover a photo that unexpectedly puts us in a festive mood. Such is the case with this outtake of October 1969 Playmate Jean Bell taken by photographer Don Klumpp; the image, taken for Bell’s pictorial, shows her in the middle of a commercial modeling gig. Perhaps it’s the thought of a loved one arriving with a cooler filled with holiday cheer—or the fact that the photo may have inspired an addition to our shopping list—but it gives us a nice Christmas buzz.

The gift-giving season can be inspiring, as can Playmates. And just like eggnog and bourbon, the right combination of the two can be intoxicating. We think that’s what happened here when the photo department started shooting holiday-themed subscription advertisements in the late 1950s. One of the first campaigns featured December 1958 Playmate Joyce Nizzari, shown here on-set.

This photo from our San Francisco Playboy Club reminds us of the last time the Playboy archivists ventured up north to the Bay Area from Los Angeles. A flurrying snowstorm played along the Grapevine on the 5, and all we could talk about was how cold it was. We could’ve used one of these Rabbit-themed Playboy holiday knit sweaters sported by the fashionable San Francisco Bunnies in this candid shot captured by staff photographer J. Barry O’Rourke. Those breezes off the Bay can be brutal.

“It does snow in Texas,” says Karen Christy, native of the Lone Star state, in her December 1971 Playmate pictorial. This photo of her was taken outside the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, where one imagines winters to be somewhat qualitatively different from those in Texas. Quantitatively speaking, we’re all familiar with that myth about the many Eskimo words for snow. But we can think of only one way to describe what snow feels like—and it’s not even a word really; it’s more of an expression… the exact expression on Karen Christy’s face.