So, I got my copy of Peanuts 70th Anniversary Holiday Collection Limited Edition, the Blu-ray boxed set with comes with a Snoopy figure and a book. And yes, I bought it for a book. A little book, 5.5 inches by 5 inches, 64 pages. And if the world really wanted to justify me spending that money on it, it would’ve included some sort of adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas in its pages. But no.

Not that there’s anything wrong with what this book, Happy Holidays, Charlie Brown, actually is. It’s a Peanuts strip collection, and of course I have a love for those. This one is a full-color collection, which they say is holiday-themed, but is really seasonal-themed. After the section on Halloween strips, there’s one that’s a mixture of fall and Thanksgiving strips, then one that mixes Christmas and winter strips. All of the strips are in color, and I would say “even the dailies” but the book is almost all dailies, just one Sunday. So this is a perfectly nice little item… but not in itself enough to buy the boxed set.

But if you want Blu-ray and digital copies of the three key specials and six others, and one new documentary featurette, and new audio commentaries on the three (not people involved in the production, but interesting creative people: animator Robert Smigel on Great Pumpkin, cartoonist Lynn Johnson of “For Better or For Worse” on Thanksgiving, and cartoonist Patrick McDonnell of “Mutts” on Christmas) and a Snoopy figure, in a doghouse that’s caught in a clear box like some kind of mime, well, then, this is it!

(By the way, if you have the set and are wondering why you can’t get to the audio commentaries: they aren’t on the main discs with the specials. There are separate recordings of each on the bonus disc.)

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