Your favorite AAUGH Blogger spent a couple nights this week in lovely Las Vegas, the town that demonstrates what humankind can achieve if we don’t stop and say “should we? Really?” I was there on business, but as the business was attending the Las Vegas Souvenir Convention, the leading tchotchke show in the United States, the trip was not entirely Peanuts-free. There was the Huge booth… no, not a huge booth (okay, it was one of the larger ones), but the booth for Huge Brands, who manufacture the sort of location-specific Snoopywear that makes you go “ooooh!” when you see it on your travels. Their line is not solely Peanuts, but it did make the largest portion of what they were showing.

I got into a conversation with the guys at the booth, and once they learned I was my Professional Peanuts Nerd self, there was a lot of respect and we covered key Peanuts-related topics… and because I was on the inside, they kindly gave me a Peanuts schwag bag normally aimed at potential customers, and inside that?

More bags!

The Las Vegas strip isn’t just casinos, although that is clearly the reason it exists. There is also lots of shopping, including one store dedicated to Coca-Cola items and another to M&M items (although they’ve taken away the free M&M 3-D movie, sniff.) These have both been there for a long time. Hello Kitty has her own café truck there. There is no Snoopy shop… but I bet one would do well if there was.

The drive home took me through Littlerock, California, and finally I did what I’d been considering doing for a fair while: stop at Charlie Brown Farms. This tourist trap mixes a barbecue dining experience with a large amount of souvenirs, retro-candy, humorous t-shirts, nuts and dried fruit, and all sorts of things you never really need by sometimes want. Now, this is not our Charlie Brown; their website says they date back to the 1920s. I was wondering if they would lean into the link to the more-famous Charlie Brown, or whether they’d avoid it altogether to prevent confusion, and the answer is neither. They had one, just one, Peanuts item in stock that I saw.

Now that I’m home, I finally had the time to update the guide to book adaptations of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s getting to around 70 editions now… and more to come, surely. This is the work that never ends!

Finally, off the Peanuts topic for a moment: if any of you particularly enjoy hearing my voice on podcasts (which is strange, but I’ve heard just that), I do a bit of acting on this past week’s Premiere The Play episode. This is a podcast series of original plays, and it was a thrill and honor to be a member of the three-person cast for “Out of the Woods”.

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