A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and the Glow of Autumn Lights

Gen Xers grew up with A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving as a mainstay TV special every year just before the big Fall holiday. I loved to watch it decades back as a kid with a bowl of popcorn. If it was snowy or a little stormy that night, that was even better.

Below is the wood crate diorama my daughter and I put together many years back. In the actual story, the Thanksgiving meal takes place outside on a sunny day. We tried capturing this, though it just seemed to lack something - like it was missing the kind of magic the pumpkin patch had in It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. So this turned into a different interpretation - more of a late in the day scene. Maybe this is how it would look if the meal got delayed until evening....

Lucy is mostly unseen in this special, maybe everyone needed a break from her - we put her over in the shadow in the corner. 

Three inch tall friends gather around the table for a late in the day Thanksgiving dinner -
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is served! 

What was supposed to look like falling Autumn leaves in this scene looks more like wall paper. And now that I think about it, the scrapbooking paper beneath the table that is supposed to look like grass actually kind of looks like 1970's green shag carpet. Strangely, all of this actually works for circa 1970's interior design when  A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving was created since all these colors are in earth tones....this outdoor scene accidentally became an indoor scene, true to its era! Sometimes things don't turn out exactly how you thought they would, and sometimes it ends up being better that way. 

One piece of toast emerges from a tiny toaster.

Snoopy's feet can be seen on the left, as he was in charge of making toast for the special occasion. On the right is a bowl of popcorn (in this case, broken up mail packaging pieces).

We took these pictures way back in 2018, they were forgotten about and just recently found, just in time for Thanksgiving 2023 which is perfect since this year is the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. The original broadcast was on November 20, 1973. From then until now, this is one of our truest touchstones as a generation.

Years back, my daughter drew jellybeans and pretzels on paper and we taped then onto Calico Critter plates. 

The handles of the wood crate look like windows, the Autumn garland and lights show through on the other side, although sometimes the purple lights look hot pink, though we'll just go with it. 

Woodstock cuddling with Snoopy behind a plastic bread loaf as they look at the Thanksgiving table

My daughter took this picture to make it look like you are looking inside at the cozy warmth of a table of gathered friends while the frosty purple glow cast down by the moon gives you the chilly feel of an Autumn night.

While I truly miss the collective experience of watching this holiday special at the same time as everyone else did when it came on traditional broadcast television, it's now on Apple TV+ and can be streamed anytime. This means you can watch it at your convenience after you've made toast, popped your popcorn and picked up pretzels and jellybeans from the store. 

Thankful for those who've been reading this blog since it started in 2011. Happy Thanksgiving. 

You can see the diorama we made for the Great Pumpkin here: It's the Great Pumpkin!

                                                                                               (c) 2018, 2023 Chloe Koffas - all rights reserved

The PEANUTS characters and related intellectual property are owned by Peanuts Worldwide, LLC

70s Rec Room Time Capsule!!

This is a look inside a circa 1970s rec room that has been a very important place in my life....

When I am in this room - this time capsule - the calendar rolls back a few decades. All the sudden I feel compelled to go find every friend (and View-Master reel) I lost track of from my early childhood. All the sudden I can hear Debby Boone and Bee Gees songs echoing in my head. 

The Rec Room: In whatever form it took, Gen Xers remember a room like this from their youth where they played air hockey and/or Atari. The difference is that I didn't set foot for the first time in this room until after 2000.

This room is a serious 70s time-capsule. It is the rec room in a condo complex built in the 1970s that my friends used to live in until recently. In an average home, most things start breaking down after a certain amount of time which is why you find appliances and misc. items in a house from any and every decade. Hardly anyone ever used the room, so to enter it is to step back in time. Because this room sat mostly sat empty over the last four decades, everything original remains. 

There is almost nothing anachronistic about this room - a Hollywood set designer could not have done a better job of creating an era with props. My friends have sold and left their condo and have left this time capsule behind. But the 70s Rec Room Lives On. 

The room includes some very cool graphic pics of San Francisco - these pics remind me of an OP (Ocean Pacific) brand yellow/tan/earth tone tee shirt I had from that same era. In this room, I can feel the roughness of macramé on my hand or the warmth of avocado green afghan blanket on my lap.

A perfect rec room requires a kitchenette (or a wet bar depending on the nature of the event). I can't get enough of the trend-setting mirrors on the wall.

Why did I always find this room so strangely comforting and thought provoking? Maybe because when I was here it felt like we were back in time - like there was still time for more things to go right and less things to go wrong in the youth of Gen X. All these graphics, and textures, and patterns would cause me to think about the fabric of time. In this room, I would get this fleeting, and maybe childish, feeling that I could somehow go back and fix all that fell apart in those years. Doesn't everyone get that feeling sometimes? This is where I would be when I would get that feeling. 

There was more than one night in this room over the last years that we discussed multiverse theory. Imagine a hypothetical situation in which Gen X did not grow up during a Crisis era of history. Imagine all those memories of yellow and orange in the background, but no endless stream of crises along with it. 

Orange chairs cast shadows on the technicolor carpet and I feel a strange desire to drink some Tang.  While  in this room, I've marveled at how EVERYTHING around me was made in the 70s.

Remember when TVs were actual pieces of furniture? There's also a record player tucked away inside this monolith structure. This is the godfather of entertainment centers, with doors that close in front of the TV. This TV's glory days were when new episodes of CHiPs, Alice, and Mary Tyler Moore would air. When several of us friends got together here, this became a good surface for setting up a laptop to occupy the kids with a movie. (Ideally retro-style Gen X claymation when possible). 

The TV is still complete with a rabbit ear antenna. Adjusting these to get a clear picture would now be considered an obsolete skill...looking at this gives me a hankering for a Swanson's fried chicken TV dinner - the kind in an aluminum tray that you heat up in the oven....

And suddenly I get a flashback of sitting on the seats of a Southwest Airlines plane by myself as a six year old to fly from the city where one of my parents lived, to the city and state of the other. In those days, I didn't just hang out with latchkey kids, I hung out with boarding pass kids. 

Since my friends moved out of their condo there will be no more dinners or late night conversations in this room. Goodbye bygone era. Goodbye 70s room. We will miss you.

for KT and CT - thanks for all the 70s memories.

(c) 2013 writing and photos by Chloe - all rights reserved....if you know the artist who did the cool retro West Coast screen-print images above, send me a message or comment so I can give them credit!!