The Greatest Gift Under Any Tree: The 1968 Corvette Stingray
By Will Davis Studios
There are Christmas gifts. And then there are Christmas gifts.
A sweater is a gift. A gift card is a gift. A fruitcake, technically, is a gift, though the less said about that the better. But a 1968 Corvette Stingray parked in your driveway on Christmas morning, dusted with fresh snow, gleaming cobalt blue under the winter sky?
That is not a gift. That is a life event.
Here's a blog post for the 1968 Corvette Stingray Christmas card:
The Greatest Gift Under Any Tree: The 1968 Corvette Stingray
By Will Davis Studios
There are Christmas gifts. And then there are Christmas gifts.
A sweater is a gift. A gift card is a gift. A fruitcake, technically, is a gift, though the less said about that the better. But a 1968 Corvette Stingray parked in your driveway on Christmas morning, dusted with fresh snow, gleaming cobalt blue under the winter sky?
That is not a gift. That is a life event.
The Car That Changed Everything
The year was 1968. The Beatles had just released the White Album. 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters. And Chevrolet quietly rolled out what many automotive historians consider the most beautiful production car ever designed in America.
The third-generation Corvette — the C3 — introduced a body style so dramatically different from anything that had come before it that people simply stopped and stared. They still do. The long, predatory hood. The shark-nose front fascia with its hideaway headlights that disappeared behind smooth body panels when not in use. The deeply sculpted fenders. The dramatic fastback roofline. The side gill vents that gave the car its unmistakable profile. The whole thing looked less like something designed in a studio and more like something that had evolved over millions of years specifically to go fast and look magnificent doing it.
Chief designer Larry Shinoda — working under the legendary Bill Mitchell — created a silhouette that has never really gone out of style. Fifty-six years later, you can park a 1968 Stingray next to anything on the road and it will draw more looks than all of them combined.
That is not an accident. That is genius.
What Made the '68 Special
The 1968 model year was the first for the new C3 body, and Chevrolet came out swinging. Under that stunning hood, buyers could choose from a range of small and big block V8 engines ranging from a 300-horsepower 327 all the way up to the legendary L88 427 — a racing engine so brutal that Chevrolet actually tried to discourage people from ordering it for street use, rating it conservatively at 430 horsepower while the actual output was considerably higher.
The L88 would run the quarter mile in the low 11-second range directly from the showroom floor. In 1968. In a car that also had a heater and a radio.
The base price of a 1968 Corvette coupe was $4,663 — roughly $40,000 in today's dollars. For context, a well-optioned 1968 Stingray in excellent condition today commands anywhere from $50,000 to well over $100,000 at auction, with the most desirable big-block examples reaching considerably higher. The market has spoken — clearly and loudly — about how the world feels about this car.
The Corvette and Christmas
There is a long and thoroughly American tradition of giving — or fantasizing about giving — a Corvette as a Christmas present. The image of a new Corvette with an enormous bow on the hood sitting in a snow-dusted driveway is so deeply embedded in the American holiday imagination that it has become a genuine cultural archetype.
And why not? The Corvette has always represented something specific and wonderful about American optimism — the belief that things should be beautiful and powerful and exciting, that life is too short for boring transportation, and that the open road is one of the finest gifts this country has to offer.
The 1968 Stingray, specifically, represents all of that at its absolute zenith. It was born in a year of extraordinary turmoil and change, and it responded by being extraordinary itself — a declaration in fiberglass and steel that beauty and performance and pure, unashamed joy were worth pursuing regardless of what else was happening in the world.
That feels like a Christmas message to us.
The Card
Our 1968 Corvette Stingray Christmas greeting card captures all of that in a single image — the gleaming cobalt blue C3 coupe parked in a magical snowy evening scene, fresh snowflakes drifting down onto that legendary hood, a glittering Christmas tree to the left, a warm glowing cottage in the background, a festive wreath-adorned lamp post standing sentry to the right, and "Merry Christmas" arching above it all in elegant red script.
It is, we think, exactly the right card for the Corvette enthusiast in your life. For the classic car collector. For the person who has had a C3 Stingray on their dream list since 1968 — or since the first moment they ever saw one. For anyone who understands that some things are simply too beautiful and too important to be forgotten.
Consider it a small Christmas gift of its own. A reminder of what American automotive design, at its very finest, looked like on a cold winter morning in 1968.
It still looks pretty remarkable right now.
The 1968 Corvette Stingray Christmas Card is available as a 5×7 fine art greeting card at willdavisstudios.com — pre-printed with Merry Christmas, blank inside for your personal message, printed on premium matte card stock, with envelope included.
