AAUGH! Here it is, the heart of frankly the most lucrative season for being the AAUGH Blogger (not that it adds up to that much), and first my main computer is in the shop for over a week, and now that it’s back, it and my scanner are no longer on speaking terms! I’m backed up with things to blog about, so forgive the low image quality for a while – I’m using my webcam.

Those of you who memorize my life know that while I collect Peanuts books, I excuse myself from collecting coloring books, for that way lies madness. But what was I to do when I saw four different titles in the dollar section of the local target, and they described themselves as “color & read along”? Books that are just for coloring, sure, that’s something I can chose to skip…. but books that you read? That’s what I’m about. I gave in and got all four.

Christmas Joy is… tries to be like the Happiness is a Warm Puppy books, with images matched with captions about what Christmas joy is. (Apparently, its sharing sweet treats and just baked Christmas cookies; it’s also guessing the gifts; and fa-la-la and ho-ho-ho!) The book comes with a nice sheet of stickers, actually mostly useful ones with the Peanuts characters holding presents and such, mixed with smaller ones that are just a present, or a tree, or some mistletoe, or a star. Each sticker is decorated with a copyright notice for “2011 PNTS”, which makes some sort of sense when it’s a sticker of Charlie Brown carrying the pathetic Christmas tree, but seems rather overboard when the sticker is just a perfectly geometric five-point star.

The other three of these books I grabbed were Good Grief, Snow Day!, and A Snoopy Day. Each is 24 pages, each with stickers. One touch I like is that on the title page, there’s a place for writing in a credit for Colors By, and it is amusingly larger than the credit for “Art by Charles Schulz”.  These are all published by Dalmatian Press, and should make nice little stocking stuffers if you find them.

And if you’re still worried about what you’re going to stuff stockings with and what will go under the tree, there is still time to order items from Amazon using their Free Super Saver Shipping for orders over $25 and have them arrive before Christmas (or the midpoint of Hannukah)… that will run out sometime Monday. So if you want to get yourself, say, a musical Charlie Brown Christmas tree, you can order now and have it for your holiday… but at the moment, that list-price $35 item is actually under $20, so if you want free shipping you can simply order a pewter Lucy figurine to go with it.

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