When I was a kid, the 4th & 5th grade music classes at Sequoyah Elementary, under the direction of Mrs. Chambers, used to put on a Christmas play every year (they probably still do, come to think of it ... I'm not sure Mrs. Chambers is still involved, or even if she's still around, but I hope she is). When I was in first grade, my first year to have any involvement with the Christmas program, the play was a live-action enactment of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." I remember that play as fondly as I remember the cartoon of the same title. I remember being enraptured as the big kids (when I got older, I was shocked to learn that the play had been put on by 4th & 5th graders. In first grade, they seemed as big and impressive as any of the junior high or high schoolers I occasionally crossed paths with) re-created characters I loved, repeating lines I'd already committed to memory even at the tender age of six. Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang had already left an indelible impression on my life, and my fondness for them has only grown deeper over the years. I can't help but smile whenever I hear those familiar jazz notes played on a piano.

People of my generation tend to fondly reminisce about "the great ones": Watterson, Larson, Breathed. Since they each layed down their cartoonist's pens, the comics section of the local newspaper has hardly seemed worth reading, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions, for me at least, was Peanuts. Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, and dare I say it, even the Far Side all owed something to Snoopy and the gang. Now the Great One truly is gone, and our Sunday papers will never be the same.

Farewell, Charles Schultz.