It's A Charlie Brown Christmas at the USPS this year

Back in the late summer the USPS announced the subject of this year's contemporary Christmas issue. Fifty years ago this coming December the animated cartoon "A Charlie Brown Christmas," based on the characters of the legedary American cartoonist Charles Schulz, was broadcast on the CBS network.

For a whole generation of Gen-Xers like myself, the annual broadcast of this animated film was proof that the holiday season was truly here and soon Santa Claus would be making his rounds.  The film itself was written by Schulz as a reminder of what the point of celebrating Christmas was originally all about, in an age where mass commercialism was rapidly changing its meaning in the collective American psyche.

The 2015 Charlie Brown Christmas double-sided booklet pane of 20, released 1 Oct 2015 by the USPS. 

The new stamps are available only in double-sided panes of 20 self-adhesive stamps, and capture many of the classic vignettes from the 1965 film.  For a sentimental Gen-Xer like myself, these designs truly bring back many great memories of holiday seasons past. 

My only qualm with the issue is the layout - twelve stamps on one side, eight on the other.  With ten different designs and the double-sided format, this means that you really need to collect the entire pane of 20 to be able to have a complete set that maintains the se-tenant format for the entire issue, which is only possible for the arrangement of the stamps on the twelve stamp side.  

As a way to minimize use of extra paper backing and save space for the consumer the layout is great, for the collector not so much.  But at US$9.80 for the pane, it's not a bank breaker. And we can be thankful that there was only one printer used, in one format.  I would not be fond of going back to the days in the late-1990s when a plethora of printers were used on contemporary holiday issues, resulting in three or more different varieties of the same set. A specialists dream in terms of perforation varieties and printing varieties, but definitely much more expensive on the collector's bank account.

In the end though it is funny to reflect on the background of this issue and its release this year.  Schulz created the film as a way to challenge what he saw as the growing commercialization of the holiday in a rapidly secularizing American society of the 1960s. Yet today, the Peanuts "brand" has become as much about making profits for the company holding the copyright to the characters as it is about entertaining and educating Americans. In a few weeks the first full-length animated film based around the Peanuts characters will be released in cinemas worldwide (and from the various previews that have been produced over the past year, it looks to be an amazing production showcasing just how far animation has come in the decades since the release of the Christmas special in 1965).

Schulz himself passed away in 2000. One wonders what he would have made of what has become of his creations in the intervening fifteen years since his passing. He himself consented to licensing use of the characters for advertising purposes (the classic Met Life insurance ads have used Snoopy in its ads since 1987) so I think it would be safe to say that he would not be totally aghast, and clearly the characters he created remain much beloved in American, and indeed global, pop culture.