The mostly-clothing store Kohl’s regular runs Kohl’s Cares merchandise, special products (generally, kids’ books and stuffed animals) that they sell for $5, with the profits going to charity. And with Christmas shopping season coming up, they’ve just launched the new campaign with about a dozen Peanuts items… five stuffed characters, one jigsaw puzzle, and six books.

Now, most of this stuff is not of particular interest to me. I don’t collect stuffies, or jigsaw puzzles, and the books are just Kohl’s editions of existing Peanuts books, and I don’t try collecting every edition of the books.

Well, except for one.

I gotta own every edition of any book adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas. That is my madness.

And yes, one of the books Kohl’s is offering an edition of is A Charlie Brown Christmas. And no, it’s not the same one that they offered eight years ago. It’s an edition of an adaptation that first appeared in 2008, and has been reused repeatedly since.

So the items were supposed to be appearing this weekend. So I got in the car yesterday, headed out to store in the next town. And they had out the stuffies (well, Snoopy, Woodstock, and Charlie Brown; the Linus and Lucy are available by online order only.) The jigsaw puzzle was there. And they had the great bargain among the book deals: a copy of Happiness is a Warm Puppy and a copy of Christmas is Together-Time, nice little gift books from the 1960s, $5 for the pair.

But they had no copies of the Happiness is a Warm Blanket adaptation (it’s the prose-and-pictures adaptation, not the superior graphic novel edition); no copies of the conceptually conflicted titles You Can Be Anything! and Be Yourself! And most importantly, no A Charlie Brown Christmas.

So I’ll have to go back next week.

Of course, if you want any of these goodies, you don’t have to drive anywhere. All of the items can be ordered online.

(Oh, and here’s one aside for those into the minutae of Peanuts book publishing: the Kohl’s copies of Happiness is a Warm Puppy and Christmas is Together-Time? They’re not being published by who you’d think. It’s not Cider Mill Press, who have been publishing that run of books in various ways in recent years, but rather published by Appleseed Press. But a little investigation shows that this is just a small adjustment; Cider Mill Press and Appleseed Press are owned by the same man, John Whalen.)

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