Four decade old Christmas wishes

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Today, the mailman brought another addition to the AAUGH.com reference library, 1973’s Wishing You A Very Merry Christmas!!. This is basically a hardcover greeting card made up of 11 two-page spreads (for you book formatting nerds, yes, they used the endpapers to achieve this), telling a little tale of Charlie Brown, Lucy, Christmas, and a large pile of snowballs. (If you suspect that this does not end well for Charlie Brown… well, hey, almost nothing ends well for Charlie Brown.) The images, including the front cover, are all character drawings dropped against a photographic background, which is an interesting look… although the neighborhood pictured seems to be a bit sparser than what I picture for the strips neighborhood in terms of houses (the trees do look right, though!) The original price was $1.50, and it was published by Hallmark as part of their Momentoes line. I’ve come across three other Peanuts books in that line to date, and suspect that there are more out there which I do not yet know about.

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Addendum to the The Wolf video

Shortly after I posted the video about the comic strip”The Wolf” which suggested ways in which it set the path for “Peanuts”, my pal and co-writer, Schulz Museum curator Benjamin L. Clark, pointed out something I had missed — while “Willie” had offered strips run in a two-tier format before …

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Unquote alone

The warning signs about the new book Rediscovering the True Meaning of Christmas with A Charlie Brown Christmas”: Celebrating Christmas with a Charlie Brown Touch starts with the title, and its curious use of a single double-quotation mark. That’s part of the name every time it’s listed, whether on the …

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Candidate Snoopy

The promotion of “Snoopy for President” dates back to at least 1961 (possibly earlier, I don’t have great reference on it.) The idea is not limited to US presidential election years, but it does tend to swell then. There was not only merch but newspaper articles on it in 1968. …