Along the Way: Have a Snoopy Christmas

Here’s hoping all of you have a Snoopy Christmas.

More to the point, here’s hoping you have that flop-eared beagle’s heart.

My wish is that you are as innocent, lovable, unsophisticated, naive and absolutely spontaneous as the late Charles M. Schulz’s cartoon creation.

Of all the great characters of fiction, the most human is a dog.

Eat your heart out, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield, Attitus Finch, Molly Bloom, Holly Golightly, Sherlock Holmes, Captain Ahab and the rest.

Snoopy is the greatest of them all!

Snoopy, as you know, slept on top of his doghouse. He had no choice. In that doghouse were a pool table, books, records, sports equipment of every kind, his World War I flying-ace goggles and his Van Gogh.

Everything went up in smoke once when the doghouse caught fire. Snoopy’s owner, Charlie Brown, was notified that Snoopy’s insurance had lapsed.

“You didn’t keep up the premiums, Snoopy,” said Charlie. “How could that be?” Snoopy said to himself. “I sent them a can of dog food every month!”

The doghouse was rebuilt and Charlie and Linus Van Pelt crawled inside one day. Snoopy is resting, of course, on top of the new doghouse. “That’s a great painting. That’s really a great painting,” one of the kids is saying to the other. “He lost his Van Gogh in the fire, you know.”

“Yes, I remember. Actually, I like this painting just as much.”

Meanwhile, on top of the roof, Snoopy, hearing the conversation below, is saying to himself: “My Andrew Wyeth is going over big!”

One Christmas Eve, snow falling against the dark sky, Snoopy, on the roof again, is thinking: “I worry about this time of year. I remember last year about this time. It was two o’clock in the morning and I was sound asleep.

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, this crazy guy with a sled lands right on my roof.

“He was OK, but those stupid reindeer kept stepping on my stomach!”

Snoopy stole the show in Charlie Brown Christmas movies. When he wasn’t decorating his dog house with lights, he was dancing or howling or playing his guitar, totally unbridled.

In one of the happiest interviews of my newspaper career, in November 1985, Schulz, a sports nut himself, explained why he used games so much in his cartoon strip.

“Sports work so well, not only because they are a caricature of life,” he said, “but because of the winning and losing. How we suffer with losing!

“Charlie Brown thought he had life licked, but there was a flag on the play.”

And undoubtedly, the referee — standing there like a stern judge — was that beagle, in a striped shirt, whistle in his mouth.

Mr. Schulz talked about the naming of Snoopy and listed from memory, names originally suggested for the Seven Dwarfs in the Walt Disney animated movie, “Snow White.”

“Some of them,” he said, “were Scrappy, Happy, Dirty, Dumpy, Hungry, Thirsty, Weepy, Doleful, Awful, Grabby, Flabby, Shifty, Helpful, Crabby, Duffy, Puffy, Biggy, Graspy and Snoopy.

“I’m sure glad Disney decided not to use Snoopy.”

In one long ago strip, Charlie Brown tells a friend the best way to train a puppy is to use a rolled-up newspaper.

Hearing this remark, Snoopy says to himself: “Perhaps ... it does tend, however, to give one a rather distorted view of the press.”

The little beagle is filled with life and curiosity and spirit, gladness, merriment and pure fun.

And I hope you are full of the same tomorrow.

Have a Snoopy Christmas!

Former Tucson Citizen columnist Corky Simpson writes a weekly commentary for the Green Valley News.