(This article is constructed from three 5CP blog posts, which ran from 2020 to 2024 ... because the saga unfolded in stages.)
I spent almost two decades wondering about this.
Very little in the way of Peanuts and Charles M. Schulz lore remains untapped, at this late stage. Thanks to the Schulz Museum's debut in August 2002 -- along with Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts book series, David Michaelis' biography of Schulz, and all manner of other books, articles and essays from numerous quarters -- we've been blessed with detailed revelations about almost every possible aspect of Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the rest of the gang.
Almost.
I first learned about the annual Peanuts Christmas countdown panels in late 1997, after signing on as a desk editor at my hometown newspaper. At that time, they were distributed on slick pages, multiple panels to a page, and contained within a cute folder, as shown below.
The panels themselves were lifted from existing Peanuts newspaper strips, but the word balloons were amended with a holiday-themed sentiment; alternatively, "silent" panels were assigned holiday-themed "titles" above the artwork. The series usually began on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and continued up to -- and, during later years, including -- Christmas Day. Because Thanksgiving is a "floating" holiday, the number of panels varied, from year to year.
By the 21st century, the panels also were available digitally -- in both monochrome and full color -- via various Internet delivery systems. The panels were sent, at no additional charge, to all client newspapers that published the daily Peanuts strip. The idea was to add a bit of holiday cheer to the season, starting the Friday after Thanksgiving, and concluding on Christmas Day.
But our local paper didn't use them, and -- for that matter -- I don't recall ever having seen them in any of the newspapers that commonly came to my attention. They weren't in the Los Angeles Times, or the San Francisco Chronicle; even Santa Rosa's Press Democrat declined to run them (which seems odd, given that Schulz lived in Santa Rosa for so many years).
So I simply took the folder home each year, ran off large copies of each panel on letter-size paper, and posted them in our living room; I sneakily changed them early each morning, before my wife got up. She worked at a bank, so I made a second set; she posted them near her desk, and similarly swapped them every morning.
United Media continued the program through 2011, then stopped. The final few years coincided with the early years of our Five Cents Please blog, which gave us an appropriate outlet for sharing the panels with the entire world. They clearly became quite popular with many followers, who were quick to send email queries when we were a bit late in posting the next one.
Starting in 2012 -- not wanting to stop what had become an enjoyable tradition -- we began to dip into the past, resurrecting previous sets from matching calendar years (when, for example, Thanksgiving fell on November 23, as opposed to November 24, and so forth). But we only had a 15-year supply, and -- as the years passed -- it became obvious that we'd soon exhaust them. Repeating a given set again, in so short a period of time, didn't appeal to us.
And it merely amplified a question that had percolated, ever since 1997.
When did this annual Peanuts feature begin? And did anybody have a list of where the panels were published?
This may surprise you: Nobody knew.
I asked numerous folks at United Media, and at Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates, and at the Charles M. Schulz Museum. People came and went, as the years passed; I asked their replacements.
Nobody knew.
Over time -- when I had nothing better to do, on a given afternoon -- I hauled out spools of microfilmed archive newspapers for every publication stored by our local university library. No luck.
A few 5CP correspondents hinted at having seen them in newspapers in the early 1990s, but their memories -- more than two decades removed -- were vague and unhelpful.
The quest hit the back burner several times: first from 2009 to '11, while researching and writing what became my biography of Vince Guaraldi; and later during a five-year stretch when I was absorbed by another publishing project. The latter wound down in March 2020; that, combined with Covid's "shelter in place" requirements then in effect, suddenly gave me unaccustomed free time.
The first order of business was catching up with fresh data about Guaraldi. Considerable information was gleaned, during the initial research phase for my biography's first edition, from the aggregate site newspapers.com, a subscription service that has archived every single issue of thousands of newspapers, large and small, from across the United States (along with a smattering of international publications). Although a treasure trove of vintage data, during that initial pass -- from 2008 to 2011 -- I was frustrated by the absence of the two newspapers most integral to Guaraldi's career: the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. Although both were present in microfilm drawers at our aforementioned university library, you can't do keyword searches on a spool of celluloid. I knew that a lot of data had been overlooked during the brute-force, page-by-page approach I took, in the time available.
Newspapers.com added numerous publications during the intervening decade; I was delighted to discover that the San Francisco Examiner was among them. (But not the Chronicle, which a year later established its archive via Newsbank, a similar archival service.)
Anyway...
I took a fresh dive into newspapers.com, and emerged with roughly 200 bits of new material about Guaraldi. Then, as I was about to sign out for the final time, the ancient question bubbled back to the surface:
Might it be possible to find Peanuts countdown panels via this site?
Tantalizing. Very tantalizing.
But how should such a search be organized? An alphabetical examination of the site's 16,600-plus newspapers would be madness. I finally settled on a key phrase, "shopping days until Christmas," and began the search in December 1990. Lo and behold, the results field -- which shows a portion of each relevant hit -- sparkled with Peanuts countdown panels. One example, from December 5, is shown at left.
(Not every hit was a panel; hundreds were from articles and advertisements that contained the phrase. You'd expect as much, during December.)
I immediately tried Decembers on both sides of 1990, with successful but limited results. The panels all came from Florida's Fort Myers News Press, but only from three years: 1989-91. Nothing earlier, nothing later. 1989 was intact, but -- maddeningly -- two days were missing in 1990 (November 25 and December 23), and five days were absent in 1991 (December 2, 4, 7, 14 and 18). I assume the newspaper didn't have room on those days, or perhaps somebody simply forgot.
Even so, this was quite a rush: evidence that the feature dated back to at least 1989.
And yet ... and yet ...
Only one newspaper, out of more than 16,600? Seriously?
Something was wrong.
I slept on it.
The following morning, I did a fresh search, this time on the shorter phrase "shopping days," again in December 1990.
Goodness.
Even though the phrase "shopping days" was a lot more popular in hundreds (thousands?) of articles and advertisements, scrolling through the results also revealed scores of different newspapers with the panels that I recognized from the Fort Myers News Press. And I quickly realized my earlier error:
The correct phrase was "shopping days to Christmas." (Apparently the Fort Myers News Press' utlization of the word "until" was an outlier.)
Moving forward, I nonetheless held the search to just "shopping days." Search engines are quirky, and it's also a function of how the metadata is handled. Narrowing each search to a specific date -- say, December 14, 1990 -- usually produced between 200 and 300 hits, of which perhaps 25 to 35 were useful.
And (of course) I had to amend it to "shopping day" in order to find December 24 panels.
Almost all of the hits came from small regional newspapers: the Hawaii Tribune Herald; the Standard-Speaker, in Hazeltown, Pennsylvania; the Oshkosh Northwestern, in Oshkosh, Wisconsin; the Victoria Advocate, in Victoria, Texas; the Billings Gazette, in Billings, Montana; the Greenville News, in Greenville, South Carolina; and many others. That explained why I was unsuccessful with the microfilm searches; all of these papers were much too small to have been archived anywhere outside their respective communities. The one exception was the New York Daily News, which carried the feature for several years in the 1990s.
So.
You'd think that finding one or two "reliable" newspapers, and then concentrating on them, would be sufficient. Nice in theory, but no: not that simple. Many small newspapers only published five or six days per week. Others -- as was the case with the Fort Myers News Press -- weren't sufficiently dedicated, and skipped days here and there. Additionally, many of the PDF scans were of inferior quality: too dark (gray, rather than white), blurry, too "dirty" (dark spots and lines everywhere), canted at an odd angle, or "wavy."
Another problem surfaced: Many newspaper editors -- or perhaps their interns -- didn't know how to count. The panels weren't identified by date until 1993, as with the 1997 example at right; prior to that, they only said (for example) "12 shopping days to Christmas." Now, we must make allowances for evening papers, as opposed to morning papers; the former would run the following day's panel, because that day's "shopping day" was essentially over. So it made sense to see two different panels on a given day.
But I was seeing four. Or five or six. Some that were two, three, even four days wrong. (Makes you question the accuracy of the rest of the paper, doesn't it?)
On top of which, some folks who did know the math, "amended" panels by assigning a given "shopping days" entry to a different one, much the way countless Peanuts fans -- back in the day -- would swap the little metal "captions" on Aviva trophies (which turned cataloguing those into a nightmare). I understood messing with the trophies; it was fun to match a desired caption with an image appropriate to a given person or occasion. But why run the panels in a different order?
All things considered, the process was completely bonkers.
But -- laugh if you will -- I was stubborn (obsessed?) enough to see it through.
My initial search suggested that the countdown panels had debuted in 1982, but in a format simpler to that which was adapted two years later. Check out the example at left, from November 28 that year; they were small squares, roughly the size of a Peanuts newspaper strip panel. The run began that day, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and produced 27 different panels through December 24.
(The feature concluded on December 24 until 1993; an additional Christmas Day panel didn't begin until 1994.)
Alas, it quickly became clear that numerous newspapers still changed numbers at whim, which led to even more math-challenged results.
But that wasn't my biggest problem. After exhausting the "shopping days" search, I lacked four panels from 1982's run. It seemed unlikely that United Media had skipped those days, so it took some time to find a newspaper that obligingly ran the panels on the front page every day, and published seven days a week. At which point, the problem became obvious, as you can see in the December 11 panel, at right.
Different wording!
Happily, that newspaper yielded all four of the missing panels, which completed 1982's run. This format was repeated in 1983; the small square panels began on November 27 -- again, the Sunday following Thanksgiving -- and continued through December 24, this time yielding a run of 28. Once again, several were "wording outliers" that didn't use the phrase "shopping days," but this time I was prepared.
Starting in 1984, the panels assumed their more "formal" appearance, although the starting date was a bit odd. Thanksgiving was early that year, on November 22 ... but the first panel didn't appear until the following Wednesday, November 28! That also produced a run of 27. Many newspaper editors still modified the appropriate number of "shopping days to Christmas" at their discretion. This quickly became obvious, because of the wide variety of type fonts used to convey that message; once again, that meant that the same panel would pop up in different papers, with a different countdown number.
The feature became more standardized in 1985; with rare exception, the same panel ran in all newspapers on the same day. Even so, occasional counting errors continued to crop up; as mentioned above, not until 1993 was the actual date added to each panel, to guide newspaper staffers into using the proper one, on the proper day.
The best news? Through diligence and determination, I found every panel from 1982 forward ... and I assumed that was the end of the story.
Not by a long shot.
********
In late October 2024, I received an email from Benjamin L. Clark, curator at Santa Rosa's Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center. We'd previously exchanged a few letters concerning the Peanuts countdown panels, so he knew of my interest.
During those exchanges, I asked him for "creation details," and he put the question to Amy Lago, who was Schulz's final United Media editor, from 1988 to 2000. As I had guessed, the captions were not written by Schulz, but by UM staffers. "The PR department ran it," Amy explained, "since it wasn't technically newspaper syndicate content but a promotion. They invited certain staffers to submit ideas (with art, if memory serves). The group then met and culled the 'bad' ones, especially ones we knew Sparky wouldn't endorse ... usually involving too much alcohol or other ideas that lacked taste.
"The ones that passed that test were passed along to Sparky for him to approve (or not). We had the person who handled corrections (originally part of the art department, then later a comics department staffer) create the 'finals' that were then sent to papers ... so, no originals. The art guy used art from the strips, of course. I don't remember whether he was allowed to draw word balloons, but probably. And I also don't remember if they were mocked up, and Sparky approved them in what would be final form, or if he saw the mockups before the finals."
(Wouldn't you love to have been a "certain United Media staffer" during those days?)
Anyway...
Benjamin pointed me to an eBay sale that featured "a large lot of 1966-69 Peanuts newspaper comic strip dailies with a Christmas focus," shown above.
He called my attention to the items at lower left.
My jaw dropped.
Yet another different style of countdown panels ... and the 1969 copyright date was visible.
1969?!?!
I returned to newspapers.com before drawing another breath.
Over the course of the next several days, I established that this style of countdown panels ran for four years, from 1967 to 1970, inclusive. That appeared to be it; searches of 1966 didn't come up with anything.
I successfully obtained full sets for those four years ... although a few hiccups hampered the process.
For starters, each run began in December, rather than the day after Thanksgiving.
More crucially, the countdown numbering didn't seem correct. As a typical example, 1967's December 4 panel -- shown at left -- claimed "18 shopping days left 'til Christmas."
The light finally dawned, when I realized that -- in the late 1960s and early '70s -- Sunday still wasn't considered a shopping day.
(My, how times have changed...!)
The younger generation has no memory of this, but well into the 1970s and '80s, many stores remained closed on Sundays due to "blue laws," which were put in place to comply with the Christian Sabbath. The first blue law was enacted in Virginia in 1617. Also known as Sunday Closing Laws or Lord's Day Acts, they prohibited the sale of certain goods on Sundays, to uphold local moral and cultural standards. As one example, in Pennsylvania, blue laws prohibited the sale of many retail goods on Sundays until 1978, when the state Supreme Court overturned them. Some states maintained blue laws well into the 21st century, and New Jersey's Bergen County still maintains one.
Regardless, these days the notion of stores being closed on Sundays -- by law -- seems absurd.
United Feature Syndicate (which hadn't yet become United Media) correctly assumed that many newspapers wouldn't run a panel on Sundays. That aside, many newspaper editors were absurdly math-challenged, changing the numbers within given panels, and running them on wildly incorrect days.
The tally:
1967 produced 18 panels; newspapers that printed them accurately began on December 4, and concluded on December 23.
1968 produced 20 panels, usually beginning on December 2, and again concluding on December 23.
1969 also produced 20 panels, usually beginning on December 1, and concluding on December 24.
1970 produced 21 panels, also beginning on December 1, and concluding on December 24.
I also noticed a rather disturbing detail.
In 1968, once most newspapers got on board -- some didn't start right away -- I found between 22 and 40 client newspapers for each Peanuts panel, on a given day...
...except on December 8, shown at right, which came back with only 10 hits. A very low number.
Franklin debuted in the regular newspaper comic strip on July 31 that year, and December 8 was the only countdown panel in which he appeared that month.
Most of the papers that ran these panels were small regional publications, and a high percentage were in the Deep South.
You can connect the dots.
Happily, things weren't quite as bad in 1969. Franklin's sole appearance, again on December 8, was on the low end of average (21 hits), but at least it wasn't egregiously low. (He didn't appear in any 1970 panels.)
To employ advertising-speak, this four-year run didn't have near the penetration of the later series, when (for example) a given 1988 panel could be found in hundreds of newspapers, large and small. I never found more than 50 hits on a given day, from 1967 through '70, and more than 40 was rare. That may have contributed to the syndicate's decision to stop after 1970 ... until reviving the tradition 12 years later.
On a final note, I must say that all four of these sets employed better Schulz panels, and better "special dialogue," than some of the later runs that began in 1982.
I duly published this information a few days before Thanksgiving.
********
That blog post was live for barely a day, when I was contacted by two similarly dogged researchers -- Sean and Joseph, take a bow! -- with incontrovertible evidence that the Peanuts countdown panels had begun significantly earlier than 1967.
Drum roll, please: This annual tradition actually began all the way back in 1963!
Those four earliest years, 1963-66, didn't attract nearly as many client newspapers; clearly, I hadn't looked hard enough, during my previous search of 1966. This time, I dug deeper. A very carefully researched tally rarely found more than two dozen hits on a given day ... and the total often was less than one dozen. (I'm sure many more newspapers ran the panels; newspapers.com obviously doesn't have archives for every paper ever published.)
As was the case from 1967-70, the "XX shopping days" countdowns for 1963-66 also did not include Sundays, for the same reason. That explains the apparent "math error" in the strip above, which ran December 10, 1965.
And here's a fun fact:
Although I'd always suspected that countdown panels were lifted from individual panels within various Peanuts newspaper strips -- which Amy Logo confirmed, above -- I hadn't attempted to source any, because the search would have been prohibitive, given the massive number of published strips. But that wasn't the case back in 1963, when the feature was only 13 years old. It seemed logical to assume that at least some -- if not all -- of 1963's countdown panels were lifted from strips that had appeared earlier that year ... and, indeed, that proved to be true. Two countdown panels are taken from the October 20 Sunday strip -- such as the one at right, from December 2 -- when a nervous Sally sneaks her curious big brother through the house, until they hide behind the couch and she confesses, "We prayed in school today."
The rarely seen character 5 appears in the December 19 countdown panel, below left, taken from the September 30 strip in which he debuted.
I'm not curious enough (or obsessed enough) to ID all of them; I'll leave that to folks with more time on their hands.
So, the tally for these four earliest years:
1963 produced 20 panels, which began on Monday, December 2 (in newspapers that paid proper attention to the math involved) and concluded on Tuesday, December 24.
1964 produced 21 panels, which began on Tuesday, December 1, and concluded on Thursday, December 24.
1965 was ... bizarre. 21 panels ran from Wednesday, December 1, through Friday, December 24 ... but most of them were reruns from 1964! Only four panels were new: those appearing on December 11, 15, 20 and 22 (although they also had 1964 copyright dates). Why reruns? Why four new panels within the reruns? Who knows? (I'd give a lot to find somebody who does know!) The fact that most were reruns may account for the noticeably smaller number of client newspapers that published any of them.
1966 produced only 18 panels, which began on Monday, December 5, and concluded on Saturday, December 24 (similar to the way the feature was handled in 1967 and '68).
Finally, yes, I'm emphatically certain that Peanuts countdown panels did not exist prior to 1963. Dennis the Menace starred in 1962's panels, which ran December 1-24; panels appearing in 1961 and earlier were generic, usually with an image of Santa Claus. Panels for 1971, and the subsequent decade, also were generic.
So: United Feature Syndicate -- later United Media -- ran two sets of panels: from 1963 through 1970, and then 1982 through 2011. Why the 11-year gap? Another question unlikely to be answered.
Assuming an estimated average of 25-27 panels for each of those 38 years, that brings the total to roughly 1,000. That's ... an impressive amount of largely unknown Peanuts lore.
The good news, of course, is that 5CP now has oodles of unseen-since-original-publication sets of panels to share, moving forward. It's a shame they'll debut only one year at a time!
