Happy Birthday to Everybody Every Day… starring Charles Schulz and Peanuts

Today is Charles Schulz’s birthday. I mean, it would be Charles Schulz’s birthday if he were still alive today. Or maybe today would have been Charles Schulz’s birthday if he were still alive today. I’m not sure what tense the ‘be’ verb should be in this situation. Maybe I actually knew at some point when I was an English teacher.

Anyway, I’m not a fan of wishing “Happy Birthday!” to celebrities (celebrities get enough attention), especially deceased celebrities, but Charles Schulz is different for me. Charles Schultz was great at drawing the daily comic strip Peanuts consistently for decades. Most people will never be truly great at anything (I have no statistical data to back this up). At least, I never was. That’s why I respect/admire Charles Schulz’s achievement with his comic strip Peanuts so much.

I’d like to say “Happy Birthday” to the average person every day, but I can’t say “Happy Birthday!” to everybody every day. That would be impractical: I don’t know everybody’s birthday, and if I did, it would take too long to do it. Still, I like the sentiment of wishing everybody a “Happy Birthday!” Sometimes people could use a random birthday greeting, and it’s better when the recipient doesn’t expect to get it from you. So if it’s your birthday today… HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

When I was teaching, Peanuts pocketbooks that collected Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown comic strips were great because there would always be a student or two who would pick them up and read them. Sometimes a student would read them during instruction, but I’d pretend not to notice, especially if the student was the type to cause distractions. Peanuts books were great at pacifying students. I don’t know if the Peanuts books would work with todays kids, though.

This comic strip sequence is one of my favorites out of the many that ran during Charles Schulz’s tenure on Peanuts. I didn’t have to follow this particular arm wrestling sequence day by day when these strips came out in the 1960s(?). I had a giant Peanuts treasury edition so that I could read everything in this sequence at the same time. I still have the book. I think I received it as either a birthday or Christmas gift. For today’s blog, I’ll just say it was a birthday gift, probably in 1973 or 1974, so thank you to whoever gave me this book! I hope I wrote you a decent thank you letter.

Last year at this time I wrote a blog post titled Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts, and the Five-Minute Birthday Party. It’s good to get a little recognition or attention on a birthday, but I wouldn’t want to devote a whole day to it anymore. Or even an hour. Maybe five minutes is good. No singing, though, especially in public.

My mom and step-dad used to call and sing “Happy Birthday” to me over the phone when we lived hundreds of miles away from each other. Nobody in my family can sing, so they sounded like a couple drunks. One year I couldn’t answer the phone in time, so they left a message. Luckily, I managed to save it. It used to make me a little sad to listen to it for a few years after they died, but now I laugh. They still sound drunk (even though they weren’t).

On my 16th birthday, my parents split up. It was kind of a surprise. I’m not going to get into too many details, but somehow that was the day when one parent discovered something incriminating about the other parent, and everything hit the fan. Cutting and eating the birthday cake that evening was a little awkward. It was a good cake too. Maybe it sounds a little callous to focus on the cake the day my parents split, but you have to appreciate the good things in life, especially when the bad stuff is going on. The bad stuff doesn’t take the day off for birthdays and holidays.

A good Peanuts book (or any kind of book that you really like) can get you through rough times. I was lucky that my house (or apartment) growing up always had stuff to read, and my parents encouraged my comic and book collecting. I know everybody has his/her own way to temporarily escape reality, but some of those ways kind be kind of unhealthy. Reading seems to be at least a benign form of escape. Personally, I think it’s F*CKING AWESOME!

I apologize for using profanity (even though it’s censored) in a Charles Schulz Peanuts post.

I’m surprised that Charlie Brown was this harsh with Snoopy. With all the times that Charlie Brown was the goat or the blockhead, you’d think he would have been more supportive of Snoopy’s efforts. I like Snoopy’s attitude. That’s the way it goes sometimes.

And before I forget… if today is your birthday, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

And if some other day is your birthday… just… ummm… come back to this blog post on that day.

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For more about Charles Schulz and Peanuts, see the following:

Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts, and the Five-Minute Birthday Party,

Charlie Brown in Peanuts vs. Crash Davis in Bull Durham,

and G.O.A.T. vs. Goat: The Battle of Generational Slang

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