A long-running Thanksgiving tradition
- By : Nat
- Category : New releases, Reviews
First off, let me apologize for the large gaps between posts here. The Peanuts-y part of my brain is focused on a possible future project, which it’s obviously to soon to be talking about and the time may never be right. Between that project and trying hard to get a series of non-Peanuts projects out the door (hey, does anyone want a book of political adult coloring books from the Kennedy era? Go order Cold War Coloring!), the blog has slipped through the cracks a bit.
But Peanuts books have still been arriving. For example, I got two new volumes of the Little Patriot Press storybooks that use Peanuts to focus on aspects of American history, the Peanuts Great American Adventure series. They’ve added a new name to these books, writer Tracy Stratford. If that name tickles your Peanuts brain, there’s a reason. Tracy is a former child star… and, most importantly to this blog, she was the voice of Lucy Van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas! She works now as a school librarian. The art is by Peanuts book regular Tom Brannon.
It’s a New World, Charlie Brown has the kids visiting a thinly-disguised version of Colonial Williamsburg, a town dedicated to recreating America’s colonial times for visitors, and slides from there to having the kids relieve the days of the early settlers, with Snoopy coming in as Squanto. At the end of the story, these colonialized kids sit down with their Native American beagle for a Thanksgiving dinner (the term “Thanksgiving” is not invoked in the story itself, but mentioned in the historical afterword. To some degree, it’s A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving being invoked. Not only is the absence of a turkey on the table being noticed, but one of the items from the unusual feast of the TV special is actually included. It’s not named in the main text (although it is visible), but it is specifically mentioned in the end that the Pilgrims loved popcorn. So perhaps the Pilgrims were just a good handful of jellybeans away from having a proper Thanksgiving feast!
In Westward Ho, Charlie Brown, the kids play at being American pioneers, making the long slow trek out west. Snoopy foregoes being a Native American in this one (actually, such folks aren’t even mentioned in the text), and is instead the wagon driver as his doghouse becomes part of a wagon train.
The books are both “Guided reading level M”, although one is for grades 1-4 and the other, K-4.
