I have come to understand that in my zeal for all things Peanuts-booky, I may have, in the past year or so, spent too much time focused on book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas, to the detriment of other things which I may have covered.

Here, I hope to rectify that situation, to provide at least a little balance. So here goes. Here, finally, long overdue, is a look at magazine adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Oh, okay, the plural may be excessive. There is only one magazine adaptation that I know of. It ran in the December 13th, 1977 issue of Family Circle. As a Christmas gift to their readers, they took the recent Random House adaptation of the animated special, reformatted it to run on eight pages, and threw it into the magazine. They even included dotted lines to cut on if you wanted to remove the pages, and a gift tag printed on the page that you can use if you have to get a gift for someone who would really appreciate 8 pages cut out of a 45 cent magazine.

The adaptation isn’t the only thing of interest to the Peanuts fan in this magazine.There’s a small ad for ceramic Snoopy ornaments, but better is the ad on page 187 for Thermos-brand lunchboxes, with kids happy about their Snoopy, NFL, 1970s-version-of-King-Kong, Rocky Roughneck, Space:1999, and The Fonz food totes. And that says something. Sure, the NFL is still big, but King Kong has already returned and gone again. The Fonz? Those of you from a later generation might not realize how huge the Fonz (a character in the sitcom Happy Days) was culturally. Now he’s a rarely used nostalgia reference. But Snoopy is still big-time. That’s staying power.

The interesting stuff in this issue isn’t just about Peanuts; there’s also the cigarette ads. The back cover ad which says “I really enjoy smoking. Do you?” That rather blunt endorsement of smoking on the whole comes from the Salem brand. But among the many other cigarette ads are two for brands that I suspect aren’t around any more: Fact, and Real. No one smokes for accuracy any more.

Remember to tell your friends about our full guide to all the print adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Today’s big discount: All nine seasons of Seinfeld in a nice box set, lots of extras, $85. That’s a full fifty bucks off of what it would’ve cost you yesterday.

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