Whenever I stop by Costco, I check out their table of books, because it is fairly frequent that they will have Peanuts books, and a fair portion of them is exclusive books not to be found elsewhere. The folks at Costco must like Peanuts. (And by that I mean “the folks at Costco must have found that Peanuts books sell”, because the folks at Costco are good businessfolks, and sales are the things they like, in context.)

Today’s visit found the table layered thick in preparation for Christmas, and among the many books they squeezed into their scarce book table space were two Peanuts titles. One was just the 2017 Simon Spotlight adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is a regular at Costco around this time of year. The other, however, while also not an exclusive, was a book that had eluded me, Christmas Time is Here! Now, I’d already had a book of that title, but that was a board book with six sound buttons, each of which plays a Christmas tune, while this one is a book with ten sound buttons, each of which plays a Christmas. Really, it’s an expanded version of the same book — taller, wider, and with more buttons and some lights that blink on along with the tunes.

But with all the ways that they expanded the book, they did not add more pages. Instead, they used the larger pages to put more on each page, so you do get all of the lyrics to sing along with the book’s tunes.

In addition to the songs that were on the original release (“Here We Come A-Caroling”, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, “O Christmas Tree”, “Deck the Halls”, “Jingle Bells”, and of course the titular “Christmas Time is Here”) the book has “Jolly old Saint Nicholas”, “Toyland”,”The Holly and the Ivy”, “Up on the Housetop.”

For a moment there, I thought that I hadn’t really missed this book last year. After all, it bears a 2022 publishing date. However, these books are also marked with a manufacturing date, in this case 5/29/2021, so it almost certainly came out last year.

The book was $15.49 at my local Costco. It is not currently available for online ordering through them.

And as long as I’m making a Christmasy post, here’s today’s estate sale find.

Once a song has been commercially released, anyone can cover it. They have to pay a licensing fee, but the copyright holder cannot say no. However, licensing “Snoopy’s Christmas” doesn’t give them any right to visually depict Snoopy… and thus we get a maniacal Santa Claus wreathbombing from his biplane.

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