Getting into the holiday spirit part 1

Whenever I think of "the holidays" (otherwise known as the Thanksgiving / Christmas corridor famous for making everyone gain 15 lbs. from all the parties at any number of friend's homes and the office celebrations and the coworkers who keep baking cookies and buying festive shaped Reese's cups and Hershey's Kisses with brightly colored tin foil), I think of "Peanuts". From the "Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" being aired a couple of days after Halloween (I almost included "Great Pumpkin", but since they show that around mid-August it misses my arbitrary cutoff date) all the way through to the "Charlie Brown Christmas Special" that will no doubt be on some time next week, this 4-5 week period of extended mall shopping hours and gaudy, fossil fuel wasting displays of electricity displayed on the outside of people's houses like a row of rejected Cher costumes makes me think of Charles Schultz's exercise in childhood existentialism (if you take a good look at Peanuts, especially the earlier stuff, it is pretty darn dark at times).

And sometimes I think of super powered mutants.