Brazilian Christmas
- By : Nat
- Category : Classic finds
The latest addition to the AAUGH.com Reference Library is… no, wait, I’m lying. I’ve had this book sitting nearby for months now, just waiting for me to get around to it. But there was no rush, it’s a 2010 book published in Brazil, so it’s not something you’re probably going to rush out to purchase.
O Natal Da Turmo Do Snoopy (“Snoopy’s Christmas Gang”, Google translate tells me) is a hardcover 9″x11.5″ black and white collection of Christmas-themed Peanuts strips in Portuguese. The strips are organized by decade, but within the decade, they are not all in order; the first page of the 1990s section, for example, has strips from 1991, 1994, 1996, and 1992, in that order. The thing that catches me off-guard is the order of the decades; they start with the 1990s and work backward to the 1950s. This fights ever organizational instinct that I have, but I can see a sense to it: lead with the version of Peanuts that may be most familiar to the reader, rather than with the earliest version which may look a little odd to those who have not spend much time with those strips. Even the endpapers have an image of late-stage Peanuts in the front and early Peanuts in the back.
The book does include the 1997 strip where Sally startles Charlie Brown awake by shouting that Santa didn’t bring him anything, but then shouts “April Fool!” This is an example of a Peanuts strip that was optimized for its original setting, the daily newspaper. Reading it in a collection, one doesn’t know if this strip originally ran on Christmas (and the joke is that Sally is inappropriately applying April Fools) or on April first (and the joke is that she was trying to April fool him into believing it’s Christmas, and a bad Christmas to boot.) To the folks who read this strip on Christmas day, 1997, there was no confusion.
Seeing this strip led me to wonder if it actually makes sense to Brazilians, if they even have the concept of “April fools” there… which was effectively answered by the fact that one of the two books they list as further reading in the back is Snoopy – Primeiro de Abril. So it does seem that’s a thing.
Your Peanuts collection is not complete without this book… but let’s face it, it probably won’t be complete even with this book. Mine isn’t. So take it easy, stress not over this, and if I don’t see you before then, enjoy your jelly beans and pretzels later this week!
