So, I’ve received my copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas Wrapping Paper Activity Book, and so I’m prepared to answer the most vital question of our time: does it qualify for our list of book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Well, let’s see. What it does have:

• A find-a-word puzzle
• three pages of figures you can cut out and color to make simple Christmas ornaments
• a dot-to-dot
• a maze
• table place-cards to color
• a message to decode
• two images to color
• a recipe for cocoa
• A folded sheet of paper to serve as an adventure calendar, with 25 images to color, one per day as the countdown to The Big Day
• Three folded 18″x24″ coloring sheets of busy scenes (Charlie Brown and Linus at the Christmas tree lot; kids ice skating; kids making snowmen) that you are expected to color and then use as wrapping paper.

What it does not have:

• Any attempt to convey the storyline from the TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas. There are some images that suggest scenes from that special, some that are merely Peanuts and Christmas, but there is no story.

Judgment: not a book adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Does not go on the list!

(And I gotta say, if you’re just looking for activity, you can get a lot more pages of activities for a lot less than the $9.99 list price of this. But this is a somewhat nifty-seeming package, with full-color images except where you have to color, a cardboard case format where the activity portions fold out of one side and the wrapping paper and advent calendar in a flip-open section on the other side. It makes a somewhat more impressive object than your basic coloring book.)

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