The second of the Peanuts Look And Find books, Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown. is in my hands, and this is a book with some nice features for the dedicated Peanuts fan.

As noted earlier, this is not a storybook, but a search-the-picture puzzle book. And to answer the lingering earlier question, no, I cannot call this an adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Only three of the eight spreads could be reasonably interpreted as being derived from that special. It’s a more general Christmas Peanuts book.

So, what makes it a bit more interesting than it might have been? The crowd scenes. In order to create crowded moments, they were willing to go beyond the usual handful of key characters, and flesh out a few of the pages with characters who don’t usually show up in licensed goods. So you can spend your time trying to see how many you can name.. and to make you feel less safe in your guesses, realizes that there are plenty of generic. So here’s Eudora, there’s Cry-baby Booby, and, wait, is that Milo? I think there’s Harold Angel… but what do we choose to call Lydia? And Faron shows up twice, once in the fur, once in snow form.

Some of the non-Charlie Brown Christmas material is generic, but some is built around other storylines… there are not one but two spreads built around Charlie Brown trying to buy gloves for Peggy Jean!

The Look and Find books are being put out in different sales and distribution terms than your typical book. (Just as an example, I saw a copy of the Halloween book in this series in a supermarket in Prescott, Arizona yesterday.) If you head to your local bookstore, you’re more likely to find it in the remainder/discount pile than on the normal shelves. At the moment, Amazon says they’re out of stock on it, but if you look, they have an order-from-third-party link… and if you click on that, you’ll find that it’s the publisher themselves selling the book, and Amazon processes and ships the order, and it’s eligible for free shipping when part of a $25 order.

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