This year’s first (and only??) new book edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas is here, and it’s not just a reprint of an existing one. No, the A Charlie Brown Christmas Ornament Book is a thing of its own… a board book with removable cardboard ornaments. That’s right, on each of the seven story spreads, part of the image is a basic cardboard ornament that you can remove and hang on the tree. And the good news (I mean in terms of the book, I’m not talking about the Christmas “Good News” that others want to talk about) is that behind the ornament is… the same picture, so that the book still works as a storybook while all the ornaments are up. Then, supposedly, when Christmas is over and you are denuding the tree, you can simply restore the ornament to its dent in the book and all is ready for next year! (I am not testing this, of course. I am keeping my book in it’s nice-nice condition, unsullied by practical usefulness. But then, I am not much of a Christmas tree guy.)

And to be clear, this really is a book adaptation… not an in-depth one, mind you, with its seven images and nineteen sentences of text…. six of which are Linus’s bible quote. The Jesus aspects are really not skimped on here, to no surprise; this book is published by Dayspring, a specifically Christian imprint that Hallmark bought out in 1999. And while as a non-Christian, I’m not comfortable with all the places people are trying to insert Jesus in the world, A Charlie Brown Christmas is not one of those places. Because that’s what A Charlie Brown Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

Anyway, if this sounds like something you’d like to have, I’d say this is a pretty good version of what they were trying to do.

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