31 Days of Halloween comes to an end for 2026 with a look at It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966). For me, it’s not all about horror when it comes to this holiday, though it seems primarily horror-driven.
It has been a fun month with a lot of writing, and I feel very motivated. I will return to primarily fiction starting next week, but I think after a whole month of Graphic Content entries, it should be something semi-regular to keep up with on the site going forward.
In any case, some words on a holiday classic and some connections that I have to it. Thank you for reading this month. Please let me know what pieces you liked most or which ones you would like to see expanded on.
Halloween is my favorite holiday. If you have been reading any of these posts this month on the site, you recognize that pretty readily. It’s not just Halloween itself, but rather that the entire month of October helps elevate my mood. My principal outlet for the Halloween season is horror expressed in all sorts of forms, but there is more than that. I love the seasonal transition. I love that by the 31st of October we’re into the aesthetics of fall.
While I have mostly been exploring horror this past month, Halloween is also a comforting kitsch for me. I love checking out the Halloween displays at stores; I am a big fan of Spirit Halloween for just existing. I love pumpkins and plastic decorations and hanging paper skeletons. I love the scary, but I love the not-so-scary, too.
So, naturally, I love It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966).
It’s a gentle, charming expression of the Halloween season that I appreciate. I am also a big Peanuts fan and have read a couple of biographies on Charles Schulz, so I appreciate the special not only as a holiday special, but for what it means to the Peanuts legacy. How can I not find comfort in Snoopy vs. the Red Baron, Charlie Brown getting rock after rock in his trick-or-treat bag, and Linus van Pelt passionately making his case for the Great Pumpkin?
The plot revolving around Linus hoping to see the Great Pumpkin is charming and also provides permission for weird kids to be weird kids. Linus, the blanket-toting philosopher wunderkind, usually the font of rationalism in the neighborhood, maintains his conviction that the Great Pumpkin exists. There is a sophistication to his constructed belief in that the Great Pumpkin looks for the pumpkin patches that show the most earnestness. However, his constructed holiday character is essentially a Halloween Santa Claus, the latter being so popular due to “better marketing.”
It’s a weird thing to say and reflects the wonderful weirdness of Linus. If Peanuts were written today, we might read the kid as having some form of neurodivergence. But when the special was written in 1966, that sort of thing wasn’t really discussed or considered openly, and thus it is portrayed as being “the weird kid.”
I like that Linus does his own thing in the special and persists with it. His evening is juxtaposed with the generally terrible evening that Charlie Brown has, and I find Linus establishing his own tradition far more appealing to me than watching the train wreck of festivities Charlie Brown tries to salvage. Linus falls asleep in the pumpkin patch and is carried home by his sister, Lucy, only to awake on November 1st, eager to prove the existence of the Great Pumpkin next Halloween. Charlie Brown rolls his eyes, naturally, the avatar of the unlucky everyman in the form of a round-headed cartoon boy, but was his evening any better than the one Linus had?
My 31 Days of Halloween tradition has existed for a long time in some form, before that first 2024 experiment where I sat down to write some thoughts after each of the 31 movies. Ever since I was a teenager, my Halloween tradition was to watch a horror movie every day during the month of October. It became a fixation for me each October, and I’ve had people remark on how strange it was. To me, it is the most natural thing in the world; October is the time for scary movies. It wasn’t as wholesome as Linus in the pumpkin patch, but in a lot of ways it was my Great Pumpkin. I’ve had people tell me it is a waste of time. I’ve had people leave me to my own devices to celebrate the holiday in my own way. I have known people who embraced what I was doing. I’ve also seen that there are other people out there who do similar things.
I think shifting it to a blogging project is going to be the new tradition, though. I was quite proud of myself for the 2024 run. I didn’t blog in 2025 due to a busy work schedule, but I had considered it. I found myself in a funk this year due to some misfortune (a real Charlie Brown year), but felt a kind of renewal thinking about repeating the 31 Days of Halloween as a blogging project again. It was an impulse that I am glad I stuck to.
I also think, like Linus, I’ll return to my pumpkin patch next year to maintain my tradition.
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