Well, it’s Oct.
26th and you know what that means?
Yep, it’s the 55th anniversary of Charles Schulz’ creation of
The Great Pumpkin.
The Great Pumpkin was first referred to on October 26, 1959
and went on to become an annual feature of the Peanuts comic strip and
later as the focus of a 1966 animated television special “It’s The Great
Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” still watched by more than 10 million viewers each
Halloween season.
The Great
Pumpkin, of course, is an unseen holiday figure that only Lucy’s brother Linus
believes in and patiently waits for each Halloween night. He sits in a pumpkin patch – not unlike this
one near our home in Colorado – waiting for the “magic” that he knows will
happen once the Great Pumpkin arrives.
Invariably, the Great Pumpkin fails to turn up, and a humiliated but
undefeated Linus vows to wait for him again the following Halloween.
During his lifetime Schulz drew nearly 18,000
Peanuts strips. Most people think of
cartoonists just for their art, yet much of what Schulz wrote for his strips
lives on vividly through the words he created for his cartoon characters to say.
“I think anybody who is writing finds
he puts a little bit of himself in all of the characters,” Schulz said in a
1984 interview. And, he said, when you
are drawing and writing a cartoon strip, “You have to put yourself, all of your
thoughts, all of your observations and everything you know into the strip.”
Including waiting patiently for The
Great Pumpkin to arrive.
Linus and Sally waiting for The Great Pumpkin
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