Review: Countdown to Christmas!

Countdown to Christmas! With a Story a Day is, to no one’s shock, the Christmas equivalent of Countdown to Halloween! With a Story a Day, providing one themed, illustrated Peanuts story for each day of the month up until the holiday… and as Christmas comes earlier in December than Halloween comes in October, that means a few fewer stories.

My reaction to the tales is mixed, with some doing an okay job capturing Peanuts, and others having a chara

cter act out of character so that a tale might have a happy ending. But then, I am about eight times the age of the people that these stories were meant for, and I expect that they have a very different relationship to Peanuts.

A few quick notes:

  • Eudora does make an appearance, for you Eudora fans.
  • The first story deals with Charlie Brown sending letters to Santa with the ZIP code 99999, when it turns out it should be 88888. Before any of you go “that’s ridiculous, the North Pole is, well, up on the North Pole, it won’t have a US Zone Improvement Program code,” I will note that the story is actually right; 88888 is the code for North Pole, DC, and letters addressed to Santa at 123 Elf Road, North Pole, 88888 end up in the hands of Operation Santa, which is designed to help get the wish lists of kids in need into hands of folks willing to fulfill them.
  • The second story has Lucy writing to Santa asking for “a bicycle and a puppy”. Who does she think she is, Rerun?
  • Rerun doesn’t make an appearance, for you Rerun fans.

The book is available for immediate shipping.

New releases
To Mom And Dad With Love

The new kids book To Mom and Dad with Love says that it’s an adaptation of a The Snoopy Show episode “To Mom and Dad with Love”… which is interesting, because as things are sorted on the Apple TV+ service that hosts such things, this isn’t a The Snoopy Show …

New releases
The “new” Peanuts story

I just received Adventures with Linus and Friends!, the second of the three announced books in Simon Spotlight’s Peanuts Graphic Novels line. About half of the book is a reprint of the graphic novel adaptation of Happiness is a Warm Blanket, Charlie Brown, the direct-to-video special released in 2011. Most …

New releases
Shot down

I am not without ego. When I get a book of intellectual analysis about Peanuts, I don’t start by delving into the introduction or foreword. No, I dive right for the endnotes, the listing of the sources that the writers relied on in building their analysis. After all, with six …