The AAUGH.com Advent Calendar, 13 days to go

December 12: Christmas Time With Snoopy And His Friends

Hallmark places several books on this list, and that makes sense. While they aren’t a big book publisher, if there’s two things they’re big on, they’re Peanuts and Christmas.With the title of Christmas Time With Snoopy And His Friends, a major question opens up: while Woodstock is clearly Snoopy’s friend, does anyone in the rest of the main cast qualify? He can’t even be bothered to remember the name of the round-headed kid who brings him his meals. He doesn’t generally seek to know or help the kids; whenever possible, he’s off on his own world.

Anyway, enough of my musing. This is a pop-up book, with lots of little interactive bits. It’s from 1978, so it doesn’t have some of the cutting-edge paper mechanics of the best modern pop-up books, but it still does a nice little job, with various things that move or flip when you pull the tab. But another factor that comes from being over a third of a century old is that this is not a new book, and anyone with kids knows that pop-up books get faced with the ravages of time more than most things. Pieces that were meant to pop or move instead fall off… and one can be left with disconcerting images like this:

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A Charlie Brown [SPOILER WARNING] Christmas

So I planned to do a big unboxing of my copy of the newly-released A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Official Advent Calendar. And I actually filmed it all… well, tried to, but in addition to my lack of cinematographic skills, it turns out my cameraphone was stopping and restarting the video …

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The AAUGH.com Advent Calendar, the Big Day

My choice of what the finest non-adaptation-of-A-Charlie-Brown-Christmas Peanuts Christmas book wasn’t a struggle. The Joy of a Peanuts Christmas is quite simply a lovely book of the core of Peanuts. It’s a strip collection, collecting Christmas-themed strips. Now, that would describe a lot of the books on this list, but …

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The AAUGH.com Advent Calendar, 1 day to go

The title of Christmas is Together-Time may be a mite awkward, but what it is isn’t awkward at all. What it is is pure, book-original Schulz, with his reflections on Christmas and what it is. And lest you think that a Christmas giftbook is apt to be pure saccharine, we …