It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

I was at Sam's this afternoon buying the huge bag of dog treats needed to placate my savage beasts and all the little niceties of life I can only seem to find there when I stumbled across a digitally-remastered copy of the Charlie Brown Halloween special with the Great Pumpkin in it. It made me smile, and I threw it in the cart along with the enormous ream of colored paper and the little containers of ruby-red grapefruit I was also purchasing.

It's been years since I watched this one, but I remember it being a part of my annual Halloween rituals when I was a child. Like Linus himself (who I always identified with for some reason), I too waited on the Great Pumpkin, except of course, mine was on network TV. I don't know if it even still comes on, but I hope that it does. I like to think that kids today aren't growing up deprived of that sweet special and its message about hoping and dreaming even when your dreams don't make sense to anybody but yourself.

Today that message was especially poignant for reasons I won't go into here, so I was really glad to see that bright orange DVD box. I think I'm going to throw a Halloween party for my grown-up friends, something silly and informal, and we can all crash here in the living room and watch Linus wait for the impossible to somehow work itself out.