Hallmark celebrates Christmas the traditional way: taking my money

Having already taken my cash for the Christmas cookbook that I announced a few days ago, Hallmark’s website announced not one but two more Christmas-themed Peanuts books, designed specifically to drag money out of my pocket and place it other places!

On one hand, we have another one of those Itty-Bittys books, this one equipped with two of the Itty-Bitty stuffed figures (although Hallmark in their product description calls them “stuffed animals”. Charlie Brown gets no respect.) The plot description of It’s a Tree-Tumbling Christmas, Charlie Brown leaves me to believe that, unlike the prior Itty-Bittys Peanuts book, it is not derived from a TV special. It’s a tale of Snoopy having messed up a Christmas tree and its needing to be fixed. That doesn’t sound like it’s based on A Charlie Brown Christmas to me!

tree-tumbling

However, I suspect that the other book newly launched is based on A Charlie Brown Christmas. That is due to a combination of my careful detective work and to the fact that the book is titled A Charlie Brown Christmas: a Hallmark Lighted Pop-Up Book.

peanuts-a-charlie-brown-christmas-lighted-popup-book-root-1xkt1701_xkt1701_1470_4-jpg_source_image

Will you be hearing more from me on this soon? Yes, yes you will.

 

 

Upcoming releases
A box of squares

This May, Fantagraphics is collecting the various small square Peanuts books they’ve published into a new box set, Peanuts All Year Round Mini Collection. This includes: A Valentine for Charlie Brown — Valentine’s Day and romance strips Batter-Up Charlie Brown! — baseball strips Waiting for the Great Pumpkin — Halloween …

Upcoming releases
Game Day returns

Back in 2020, Fantagraphics dropped Game Day, a boxed set of sports-themes Peanuts strip reprint paperbackss, as a Costco exclusive. Next June it’s coming back, this time in hardcover and available through the usual sources. Designed as a Father’s Day gift, it should be good for anyone who likes Peanuts …

Upcoming releases
An unauthorized? biography

In the past, I’ve talked about the Charles Schulz biographies that are produced as part of bulk lines of biographies for school libraries, very brief, photo-heavy things meant to give kids something to write book reports about. Well ABDO, a company that has produced just such a biography in the …