xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This is the first of two Christmas comic released around Christmas of 2019, with 2246: Christmas Presents being the second Christmas comic, released on Christmas Day. It is also the first of two comics in a row about presents, and it is also the last comic released before Christmas Day.

Edible Arrangements is a company that sells fruit, and other edible items that have been cut and arranged to look like flower bouquets. They can be ordered and sent to a given recipient for a variety of purposes. Flower arrangements are typically not eaten, as showy flowers are so economically inefficient to mass produce that modern culture has forgotten they are edible.Template:fact

In the first panel, Cueball seems to find the concept incongruous, and wonders how it came about. Megan points out the easy answer: picking out a gift for someone can be difficult, but a tasteful meal is always welcome so long as it's something the recipient can eat safely.

Shortly afterwards, Megan uses the same incongruity of eating a floral arrangement to make puns. Vore of the Roses is a play on the War of the Roses, either the English civil war or the 1989 movie of the same name. 'Vore' is a word part referring to eating, as in carnivore (meat eater), herbivore (plant eater), voracious (hungry or eating a lot), etc. It's also used on the internet to refer to the fetish vorarephilia, in which one gets sexually excited about the idea of eating or being eaten by someone (not in the metaphorical sense of oral sex, but actually consuming someone whole).

Cueball is probably in pain because of the bad pun (or perhaps because he doesn't like the idea of food items desiring to be eaten) and says he will cancel the edible arrangement that he had bought for Megan. She tries to convince him otherwise by providing alternative names, which are evidently not any more to his liking, since he has left Megan before she's finished with her suggestions.

Mouth Blossoms, Juicy Bouquet, and Oral Floral are all combinations referencing the eating of a floral arrangement. In theory, these combinations could be good names for a band, or possibly a tumblr blog.

The title text also makes reference to the fact that many flowers that are often found in floral arrangements, such as roses, violets, tulips, daisies, lavender and many more, are items that a human can eat. Such flowers are safe to consume but usually unappetizing; Randall makes the point that if a person is sufficiently hungry and thus doesn't care how appetizing their meal is, any floral arrangement can be eaten. Since he doesn't use flower in the title text, he actually says that if you are hungry enough anything can be eaten. The title text may also be an allusion to a Mitch Hedberg joke: "Any book is a children's book if the kid can read!"