It’s official: The best TV Christmas special ever made is being turned into a series of holiday postage stamps, and you can preorder them now. Should you? Good grief, yes!
The first Peanuts animated TV special, written by that comic strip’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, was called A Charlie Brown Christmas, and was a minor miracle of family TV programming.
The alternately sweet and surly characters, the infectious music by jazz composer Vince Guaraldi and the blatantly religious message (Linus even quotes from the New Testament for the show’s climax) made the special an instant classic when it was first televised by CBS 50 years ago, on Dec. 9, 1965.
In recent years, it’s been shown annually by ABC, still delighting children and adults of all ages – even though, were it made from scratch these days, it probably wouldn’t get past the first round of network notes.
But A Charlie Brown Christmas is a holiday TV tradition worth treasuring – and one of the few full-family TV traditions we, as a culture, have retained.
The United States Postal Service has just made it even easier to celebrate, by issuing a series of first-class postage stamps emblazoned with scenes from A Charlie Brown Christmas.
And they’re “Forever” stamps, which means even as postal rates increase, these stamps will cover the cost of mailing a regular first-class letter.
It seems only fitting, since A Charlie Brown Christmas, the TV special, is forever, too.
The stamps are available Thursday, Oct. 1, at post offices nationwide, and books of 20 can be pre-ordered today for home delivery, at a total cost of $9.80 each, by visiting the special Charlie Brown USPS website page.
Save some for me, please….