Dearest Elena… today’s book is It's the Great Pumpkin by Charles M. Shulz. It is about one of Mommy’s favorite characters in all of animation, Charlie Brown. It begins with Lucy, one of Charlie Brown’s friends, telling him to kick a football that she will hold for him. Historically, however, when Charlie Brown tries to kick a football that Lucy holds, she takes it away from him and he lands flat on his back.
This time, Charlie Brown says he’s not going to fall for it, but Lucy produces a signed document promising she won’t take it away. He looks at it and decides he will try and kick the football. But low and behold. Lucy takes it away and he falls on his back. When he asks her about it, she replies that it wasn’t notarized, which means it wasn’t official.
When the conversation gets to Halloween, Lucy’s brother, Linus, Charlie Brown’s best friend, says he is going to wait in the pumpkin patch for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin who will fly overhead and give all the children toys. Lucy thinks her brother is crazy to believe such a thing. But Linus is firm in his belief and even gets Charlie Brown’s sister Sally to wait with him. Meanwhile, the rest of the people in the book do what is traditional on Halloween.
So what is that you may ask? Halloween is a unique holiday when people dress up in costume and go trick or treating, knocking on doors in the neighborhood and people give you candy. Charlie Brown and his friends dress up as ghosts. Sometimes people dress up as scary things like witches and black cats. There is carving of faces on pumpkins, too.
So, while everyone else is trick or treating, Linus is in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great pumpkin to make his appearance. He is firm in his belief that the Great Pumpkin will show up. He will wait for him every year because he knows he will come.
Now, what is the moral of this story? It's about faith, the belief that something will happen. Linus may or may not ever see the Great Pumpkin, but he believes he will. Lucy doesn’t have a belief. Now, who would you like to be? Linus, who believes in something that may or may not be true, or Lucy who takes a football out from under Charlie Brown so that he falls on his back each time? Charlie Brown believed Lucy wasn’t going to do that again.
Mommy believes she would far rather be Linus because by believing in something you have the power of belief behind you. It is better to believe in something that may not be true than to not believe in anything, like Lucy. Another word for belief is faith, believing in something you can’t see but you believe to be true.
Faith is very powerful and people have faith in all sorts of things: for example, believing that someone who is sick will get better. By believing that a person will get better, just maybe your belief has something to do with making it happen. I hope you always have faith in the things that are important to you because it is better to believe in things you want than to think things are not possible.
Mommy had the power of faith when she dreamed you would come into her life. It wasn’t easy for Mommy and Daddy to have a baby, but with faith and belief, it finally happened. You are above and beyond anything we could have ever hoped for. You are a dream that Mommy is thankful for every second that she breathes. Mommy and Daddy will never take it for granted that something we believed in and prayed for, for so long, finally came to be… the miracle that is you.