“Socks” was the name of Bill Clinton’s cat, but it’s the favorite apparel item of his predecessor, President George H.W. Bush. He’s designed his own socks for GOP fundraising efforts, he’s worn fly-as-heck socks with his own face on them to NFL games, and his sock collection has made him the subject of a fashion slideshow for Time magazine. 

And as the former President celebrates his ninetieth birthday, he’s asking for help choosing his next pair of socks: the HappyBirthday41.com website gives fans (and haters who want to demonstrate that with a snarky design) the chance to draw-up Bush’s birthday socks. Users can either freehand a sock design into a PDF and mail it in, or use the browser-based sock designer built into the website to choose colors, patterns, and more to properly customize a pair. 

Pattern options are suitably eclectic for a birthday gift to a man who wore socks with his own face on ’em in public: You can put cowboy hats, pictures of Millie the Bush dog, the Statue of Liberty or the Liberty Bell, blue and red stars (one of which once carried Communist connotations), the Avenger fighter plane that he flew in World War II, and more. Mix and match them to properly customize your socks! 

We’ve come up with a few sample designs to get you started, but feel free to design your own pair for the former President—who will personally be selecting his favorites, which will then be displayed at his Presidential Library. President George H.W. Bush seems to be kind of a fun guy, at least when it comes to his taste in socks (and when it comes to his choice of contests to celebrate his ninetieth birthday), so we decided to go bold with our options: 

As famous as President Bush’s love for socks is, equally famous is his distaste for broccoli. To tweak that part of his public image, the sock generator offers broccoli as an option for the pattern. We decided to give that broccoli a Texas flavor by slapping a cowboy hat on it, to see if that might soften his attitude a bit—along with some red, white, and blue accents to accompany the black socks that older men tend to favor.

Of course, a world-famous sock enthusiast isn’t necessarily going to strictly favor the black socks, so this green-and-brown earth-tones number, with an oil derrick and the silhouette of an eagle, might better capture the President’s love of color.

There are more color options available, too—maybe a strutting elephant with a Texas brand and a cowboy hat jauntily askew, carrying some birthday balloons, in Houston Texans colors is more the President’s speed? 

Okay, President Bush probably won’t like this one a whole lot, but we did think it was funny that you could make him socks that look like a Rage Against The Machine album cover. 

If you make socks of your own for President Bush, tweet ’em at us @TexasMonthly. 

(AP Photo/Aaron M. Sprecher)