Halloween in Charles Schulz's Peanuts frequently meant it was time for another run at the Great Pumpkin. This running gag, introduced in 1959, was sort of like Schulz's answer to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Linus van Pelt spent every Halloween for almost 40 years waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arrive, and he never did.
The roots of the Great Pumpkin joke seem to lie in a comic strip from Oct. 23, 1959. Charlie Brown complains to Patty that he couldn't get a Halloween mask from the store... because they'd already moved on to selling all their Christmas decorations.
It's interesting to see this complaint in a comic strip from 67 years ago. We often assume that the aggressive commercialization of Christmas in particular has gotten worse in the 21st century, but it turns out it was still an issue when our grandparents were young.
It also helps bring the Great Pumpkin into context as a parody of that commercialization. As time went on and Schulz evolved the joke, the Great Pumpkin picked up enough of its own unique lore that it moved away from its origins. In its first appearance, it's more obviously a case of a little kid getting Halloween and Christmas confused courtesy of consumerism. By the '70s, it had become more of a commentary on religious culture and blind faith, with Linus occasionally going so far as to proselytize door-to-door on the Great Pumpkin’s behalf.
Every successive run at the Great Pumpkin gag saw Linus double down on it, sometimes roping other characters like Sally and Marcie into his pumpkin crusade. Schulz ran a new Great Pumpkin story almost every year between 1959 and 1999, only skipping 1972, 1974, 1978, 1992, and 1995. In some years, such as 1986, a single Great Pumpkin joke was Peanuts' only acknowledgment of Halloween at all.
With that in mind, we went hunting for some of the exceptions. Here are five of the best Peanuts strips celebrating Halloween that have nothing to do with the Great Pumpkin.
5 October 29, 1951
This is the first Peanuts Halloween strip. While Peanuts was just over a year old at this point, its first year had no holiday strips at all. Even Christmas was just another day in 1950.
This early into Peanuts' run, the comic's humor was primarily still about children doing childlike things, rather than the character-driven bits that would come to define it in later years. This is a good example, as while you could probably assume it’s Charlie Brown and Shermy practicing their Halloween scares under those costumes, there’s no real way to know. More importantly, after reading this strip, it's been hard not to refer to the period leading up to Halloween as "ghosting days."
4 October 30, 1952
Lucy van Pelt was introduced in March 1952 and quickly became one of the stars of Peanuts, crowding older characters like Patty and Violet out of the limelight. Lucy was depicted as a toddler early on, and while she was always stubborn, she didn't get her full mean streak for a few years. By roughly 1959, Lucy was well on her way to her final form as the neighborhood tyrant.
In her first couple of years, however, Lucy was fussier, more of a crybaby, and prone to making mistakes at her own expense. More importantly, when she clashed with Charlie Brown in the early 1950s strips, sometimes Charlie would actually pull out a win or at least do something in his own defense. Such is the case for the Oct. 30, 1952, strip, where Lucy gets an incomplete jack-o'-lantern dropped on her head.
3 October 29, 1954
Three years after his introduction as a baby, Schroeder was rapidly brought up to the point where he was more of a peer to the rest of the Peanuts gang. By 1954, he was roughly Charlie Brown's age while Charlie Brown had barely aged at all. Comic book time is a strange and unexplored science.
In what would become an increasingly rare sight as Peanuts continued, Schroeder appeared in a Halloween strip in 1954 that has nothing to do with classical music or its history. When Patty tells him it might be chilly on Halloween night, Schroeder tries on a jacket over his ghost costume, to mixed results.
Really, this is here because the jacketed ghost is a fun visual. If you want a nice low-effort Halloween costume this year but still want access to pockets, this is a deep cut but a solid pick.
2 October 31, 1974
The Great Pumpkin showed up even less than usual in 1974. Instead, the only Halloween strip that year was this done-in-one between Snoopy and his pal Woodstock, where Snoopy creeps his bird pal out with a 10-word ghost story.
Again, this is included simply for the sight gag in the last panel. Woodstock hiding inside Snoopy's ear is good for a laugh, and it's rarely replicated anywhere else in the strip's run.
1 October 28, 1998
Lucy and Linus's little brother Rerun can Pelt is older than most Peanuts readers think. He first showed up in 1972 in a series of strips about how his mother would cart him around town on the back of her bicycle. Later, around 1995, Schulz pulled Rerun out of obscurity and put him on center stage, to the point where much of '90s Peanuts comes off as the Rerun Show.
In 1998, while Linus is warming up for his usual Great Pumpkin shenanigans, Lucy prepares to take Rerun trick-or-treating for the first time. Rerun would like a bicycle, so he's hopeful that he'll get one, but Lucy has to explain to him that, well, you have to take whatever treats a given house will give you.
Rerun's big running joke, aside from his constant attempts to get a bicycle as a gift, is his wide-eyed confusion about the situation he's in. Earlier Peanuts characters simply take the world at face value or make up their own rules as they go, but Rerun prefers to point out the absurdities that we all take for granted, both inside and outside the strip. It is sort of crazy that once a year, we send out our children to shake our neighbors down for candy.