I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. Now that I’m home for Thanksgiving break, I decided to turn to what always helped me as a little kid who was also lying awake in the middle of the night: “Peanuts” cartoons.
Many, many Christmases ago, Santa gifted my brother a copy of “Peanuts 2000,” an anniversary collection of the last year of Charles M. Schulz’s iconic comic strip. I didn’t steal the book from my brother — he abandoned it on the coffee table for a few days after Christmas, and I may have snuck it back to my room, hoping he wouldn’t notice. (Luckily, he still hasn’t.)
I flipped through it on nights when I couldn’t fall asleep or simply didn’t want to. I would read the comics and run my fingertips over the illustrations of my favorite characters and also some that I didn’t know, like Snoopy’s brother Spike, or Lucy and Linus’s little brother Rerun.
When I unearthed my copy of “Peanuts 2000” from the bottom of the drawer in my bedside table, it was covered in a thin layer of dust. Though I generally love books with some wear, tear and yellowed pages, I was relieved to see that my well-loved book of comics was seemingly untouched by time, except that page 138 was still dog-eared from the last time I put it down. I wonder if that past version of me thought I would resume my reading the next night, or thought it might be years before I cracked open the cover again. When I opened dog-eared page 138, I felt like I was finding that elementary school Nicole who thought about snow days and soccer practice and science fairs — a completely different version of me, yet one who couldn’t fall asleep then just as I can’t fall asleep now. Somehow we’re still the same.
Rediscovering these characters isn’t just a return to my childhood, but a return to childhood generally. The world of Charlie Brown, Sally, Lucy, Linus and, of course, Snoopy is one of wonder and innocence, where small problems are huge and huge problems are manageable, if existent at all. It is also their relatability, and their sweetness, that has made them beloved by audiences of all ages — there’s a reason Snoopy still floats down Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day and that even the most cynical of all the Grinches loves to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” each holiday season.
I love watching the “Peanuts” holiday specials with my family each year and seeing ourselves reflected on the screen. I hope my dogs have more respect for me than Snoopy has for Charlie Brown, but I know my labradoodles’ inner thoughts and past lives are just as rich as that beagle’s. I see my brother reflected in Linus, who is sweet and almost too smart for his own good, and how he uses his intelligence to occasionally outsmart his bossy and crabby sister Lucy. I see myself in Lucy who will put bossiness and crabbiness and everything else aside to find her brother in a pumpkin patch in the middle of the night and bring him inside. I love laughing at the same jokes that I laughed at the first time I watched the specials when I was little, and seeing my mom laugh at the same jokes she found funny when she was little, too. When we unpack our Christmas ornaments, I love that my brother and I can unwrap an ornament we got from the Charles M. Schulz Museum on a family vacation to California in 2015, and a ceramic figurine of Lucy that my grandpa gifted to my mom in 1978.
There’s a certain kind of magic in knowing that it’s not just me and my generations of family members feeling this connection to an idiosyncratic group of characters, but everyone else all across the country and their families feels the same way, too.
The list of quotable “Peanuts” moments from the television specials is endless: from Charlie Brown’s oft-repeated grumble of “man’s best friend” directed at Snoopy, to Lucy’s belief that one “should always wear a costume in direct contrast with their personality” before slipping on a witch mask. But one of my favorite lines of all time is in a strip from “Peanuts 2000” where Snoopy and Rerun are jumping on a jigsaw puzzle. They happily exclaim that “if the pieces don’t fit, we make ’em fit!” I think about this line often — when I’m jamming one last item in my backpack, squeezing a quick Zoom meeting into an already-hectic daily schedule or formatting an unruly newspaper page on InDesign. Though the comics are about children and capture that childlike innocence, “Peanuts” cartoons really teach adults to move through the world with a childlike mindset. We’re all just trying to make the pieces fit.
Reading through the “Peanuts” comics really didn’t help me fall asleep any easier this time, but this won’t be the last time I visit those characters and their wonderful little world to help sleep arrive a little sooner.
