The Great Pumpkin returns!
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- October
- 15
NOTE: This entry originally was posted Oct. 15 on our temporary site.
There are some shows that air each year at the same time, and rightfully so.
Among them is the absolute classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (check back in a couple months to see if I similarly wax poetic about A Charlie Brown Christmas).
When I was but a wee lass, I loved the Peanuts comic strip. I had ever single freakin’ book, read it religiously and laughed my little fanny off. I watched the Halloween special, the Christmas special, the Easter special. I wasn’t Christian, and the latter two specials had a slightly religious overtone, but it wasn’t cloyingly so and I didn’t mind it at all.
In kindergarten, I was so enamored of Peanuts that I wrote to Charles M. Schulz and invited him to visit my class. He wrote back, thanking me for the invitation but begging off because he was very busy. He included an autographed drawing of Snoopy and became this 5-year-old girl’s hero. His letter was framed and hung on my bedroom wall for years.
Some years later, I went through a phase where I wrote to every cartoonist I could track down an address for, including Schulz. He wrote back again, thanking me for my fanship (is that a word?).
As an adult, I spurned Peanuts for edgier and less straight-forward fare, such as The Far Side and Bloom County. But when I’d get to the comics page in the daily paper, I couldn’t help but take a glance at what my old friends were doing. I rarely got a chuckle from it, but I’d look each time nonetheless.
Even now, with Schulz dead and his comics in re-runs, I still read it. A lifetime habit doesn’t always have to be broken. I’ve not watched the Charlie Brown specials in many years.
But now my older son is 3 1/2 and I can’t wait to sit down with him at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 30 on ABC for him to see Linus in the Pumpkin Patch, once again, hoping against hope that the Great Pumpkin will pay him a visit. He’s been doing it every year since the show first aired in 1966, before your humble writer was even born.
Maybe in another two or three decades, my son will be sitting down with his children for their first viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
Here’s hoping it’s still being broadcast each year. Some habits just don’t need to be broken.
—Amy Vernon
This entry was posted
on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 2:51 pm by Amy Vernon.
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