The big pile of books that arrived yesterday had mostly The Peanuts Movie-related items… but I’m going to start looking at the pile with the new book adaptation of A Charlie Brown Christmas. That’s right, I’m eating dessert first! And this is indeed an all-new adaptation, not just a reformatting of an existing one.

The first thing that you notice on picking up the book is the cover. The snow is not only has lots of little sparkly bits, but is also soft. Other parts of the image are embossed.

The inside has a text adaptation by Tina Gallo, illustrated in a very animation-derived way by Scott Jeralds.  Over twenty-two pages, they hit the key points, don’t try to cover every line. (Whenever I talk about A Charlie Brown Christmas adaptations publicly, someone says “I bet they leave out the Bible stuff, though, because it’s not politically correct.” No, Linus’s speech is still in there, It always is.)

This has no strange surprises, no attempt to replace less-known characters with more famous ones, no stunning art tricks. It does the job of adapting the special we know with respect (as is particularly appropriate for something with a 50th Anniversary logo emblazoned). It is not the first such book to do so, and I suspect (and hope) that it will not be the last.

This adaptation is also available for the color Kindle – no soft snow, but it does include audio.

This is the second new book edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas to be released this year, but likely not the last. Hallmark has had a new edition each year for a fair run of years now; I’d be surprised if this year were the exception.

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