Yeah, I know I’m a little late on this one. My wife bought me this in December and I kept meaning to read through it, but silly, absent-minded me put it up on display with my other Peanuts Christmas decorations and forgot about it. As a result, it wasn’t until just a couple days ago that I finally read it, using our dog Winston as my stand-in for the human child we don’t have yet as I read it aloud.
He was very interested in the pop-up parts and I had to make sure he wasn’t about to eat them, because he sniffed and mouthed at them quite intensely. I too rather liked them, even if some of them didn’t do a good job of actually popping up, and even if it was kind of tough to read the text at the same time as you showed the pop-up elements. Oh, and then there were the parts that weren’t necessarily pop-up so much as they were pull-out, the little tabs that held them in place being a pain to fight with, and the cardboard being finicky as you tried to unfurl it fully. One of them, I accidentally ripped where it was glued together as a result of it being so poorly manufactured in that respect.
In short, the pop-up aspect of the book is super hit-or-miss. The Hallmark versions I’ve seen seem to be far superior in that regard. Still, it’s A Charlie Brown Christmas and you can’t really go wrong with that, even if there’s some fighting of the book involved in the process. And it’s still a nice have for the novelty.