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It’s pumpkin spice season, and that means it’s time for Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, That Round-Headed Kid, and the whole gang to appear in It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. One of the most beloved of the animated “Peanuts” specials, it’s based on Charles M. Schulz’s long-running comic strip. The newspaper comic debuted in 1950, and the nearly 18,000 strips published before Schulz’s death in 2000 make “Peanuts” perhaps the longest-running story ever told by one person. Whether you’re waiting in the pumpkin patch with Linus or trick-or-treating (not for rocks!) with everyone else, here are five fun facts about some of America’s favorite cartoon specials.

First, There Were Fords

In 1956, country and gospel singer Tennessee Ernie Ford became the host of the prime-time musical variety program The Ford Show, which was sponsored by the Ford Motor Company (no relation). In 1959, Ford licensed the “Peanuts” comic strip characters to do TV commercials and intros for the show, hiring film director and animator José Cuauhtémoc “Bill” Melendez to bring the figures to life. Melendez, who started his career at Walt Disney Studios, was the only artist whom Schulz would authorize to animate the characters. The multitalented Melendez also provided the “voices” for Snoopy and Woodstock.

And Then Came Christmas

The animated commercials (and The Ford Show) were a huge hit. On December 9, 1965, the 30-minute A Charlie Brown Christmas made its debut on CBS. Some predicted that the show’s use of child actors, lack of a laugh track, and jazz soundtrack would render it a flop. Instead, A Charlie Brown Christmas won an Emmy and a Peabody and became an annual tradition, airing on broadcast television for 56 years before moving to the Apple TV+ streaming service in 2020. Jazz composer and pianist Vince Guaraldi’s score became a bestselling album, with more than 5 million copies sold. It’s the second-oldest recurring holiday animation, coming after Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which made its first appearance in 1964.

A “Peanuts” Special Probably Killed (Aluminum) Christmas Trees

A Charlie Brown Christmas was a critique of the materialism and commercialism of the Christmas season, and was especially harsh on the mid-’60s mania for shiny aluminum trees. The Mirro Aluminum Company (then known as the Aluminum Specialty Company) of Manitowoc, Wisconsin, began producing Evergleam aluminum trees in 1959, and at its peak in 1964, made around 150,000 of them a year. In the special, Lucy orders Charlie Brown to “get the biggest aluminum tree you can find … maybe paint it pink!” Charlie Brown instead chooses a half-dead, barely needled little fir. Sales of the shiny fake trees plummeted soon after.

Halloween and Thanksgiving Came After Christmas

The first “Peanuts” special was such a hit that it soon spawned an entire industry of “Peanuts” specials. Many were themed around holidays, including Arbor Day. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which aired in 1966, has our poor hero receiving rocks instead of candy while trick-or-treating. The plot of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, meanwhile, which aired in 1973, had Peppermint Patty inviting the gang to Charlie’s house for dinner — when he was supposed to eat with his grandmother. Linus, Snoopy, and Woodstock pull together a feast of toast, popcorn, pretzels, and jelly beans … but there’s a happy traditional turkey for everyone at the end.

There Are a Ton of “Peanuts” Specials, and They’re Still Popular

In addition to the holiday-themed programs (which included shows for New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, and Easter), the “Peanuts” specials empire includes a full-length feature, A Boy Named Charlie Brown. Greenlit in 1969 after the success of other specials, A Boy Named Charlie Brown has its namesake competing in the National Spelling Bee, only to blow his chances by misspelling the word “beagle.” There are also documentaries and television series, including new releases like Welcome Home Franklin, which aired for the first time in 2024.

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The color yellow is one of the more perplexing hues on the color wheel. Humans perceive the color as both energetic and aggressive as well as warm and frustrating. Some cultures consider it a symbol of power and good fortune, while others conflate the color with weakness (“yellow-bellied”) or manipulation (“yellow journalism”). These six facts explore the ins and outs of the tone and all the various ways it fills our everyday lives.

Yellow Pages Were Created Because a Printer Ran Out of White Paper

One day in 1883, Cheyenne, Wyoming-based printer Reuben H. Donnelley was busy printing the latest edition of the phone directory when he unexpectedly ran out of white paper. Unwilling to put off production until he could restock, he instead resorted to finishing the job with yellow paper, unknowingly creating an icon of the then-nascent information age. After subscribers commented on how these yellow pages were easy to find amid piles of white-hued publications, Donnelley produced the first official Yellow Pages phone book three years later. Using the color yellow for telephone business directories then became the norm around the world.

The Creator of the Yellow Smiley Face Only Made $45

The bright-yellow smiley face is a symbol baked into the fabric of the digital age, providing the foundation for the emoji that have become the techno-hieroglyphics of modern life. But that very first exaggerated face had to come from somewhere — and that somewhere was Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1963, the State Mutual Life Assurance Company reached out to graphic designer Harvey Ball to create a symbol to help boost company morale. “I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunshiny and bright,” Ball later told the Associated Press. For 10 minutes of work, he received $45 — not a bad rate, but not exactly commensurate with the $500 million business that yellow-hued grin inspired.

The First Emperor of China, Huangdi, Was Known As the Yellow Emperor

Although purple is often associated with emperors, kings, and queens throughout European history, yellow is the color of royalty in ancient China. This has to do in large part with the country’s quasi-mythological emperor Huangdi, who supposedly ruled around the 27th century BCE. It’s traditionally believed that Huangdi (huang means “yellow” in Chinese) introduced wooden houses and the bow and arrow, and defended China against bands of marauding barbarians. For these (supposed) efforts, Huangdi now stands as a legendary figure and mythical progenitor of the Han Chinese people. Although the historicity of Huangdi has been called into question by historians in the 20th century (CE, that is), his story has exalted the color yellow in Chinese culture as a hue that embodies royalty, power, and good fortune.

The Sun Isn’t Actually Yellow

Many kindergarten drawings magnetized to fridges around the world feature a big yellow sun with bright rays shooting in all directions. But is the sun actually yellow? How our eyes perceive the sun’s color relies on a variety of things, including the light’s intensity, environmental factors, and the limitations of human biology. Because Earth’s atmosphere is so effective at reflecting blue light, the light that eventually reaches our eyes has a slight yellow tint to it. When the sun is closer to the horizon at sunset, the sun’s light passes through even more of Earth’s atmosphere, thus scattering even more blue light, which makes our host star a warmer, reddish hue. But when astronauts escape the confines of Earth’s atmosphere, the sun they see is completely white, as the star basically emits across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma waves. According to NASA, however, the sun emits most of its energy at around 500 nanometers in the visible spectrum. This means the sun is technically blue-green, but the physical limitations of our eyes prevent us from perceiving it.

We Are Biologically Wired To See School Bus Yellow

Parked outside schools across the U.S. are bright-yellow school buses, and that subtle color assault on your eyes is by design. In 1939, school transportation officials met at Columbia University to standardize buses in an effort to make them both safer and cheaper to mass-produce. During this meeting, 50 shades of yellowish orange were pinned to the wall, with Color 13432 — known today as National School Bus Glossy Yellow — eventually emerging as the winner. Humans are trichromatic, meaning our eyes have three types of photoreceptor cells (red, blue, and green), and as a wavelength, school bus yellow is at the peak where two of our three photoreceptors (red and green) are equally stimulated — so it essentially sends double the transmissions to the brain.

Maybe Avoid the Color Yellow on a First Date

While yellow is beloved by some cultures, school transportation boards, and certain springtime pollinators, the color scores low marks when it comes to fashion. According to a 2010 study published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, yellow ranks among the lowest for both men and women when it comes to a “mean attractiveness score.” Conversely, the highest-scoring colors among both sexes were red and black.

Additionally, an unrelated survey held in 2013 by a U.K. online retailer asked around 2,500 adults about the attractiveness of certain clothing colors, and yellow again scored low marks. To add insult to injury, yet another survey found the color yellow inspired the least amount of confidence (along with orange and brown).

However, some of these preferences may be regional. A 2019 study surveyed 6,000 people across 55 countries about their feelings for yellow in general, and found that preferences for yellow increased in areas with rainy weather far from the equator. This is likely because the color yellow is more closely associated with warm, sunny weather, which is rarer the farther you move away from the globe’s middle.

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If Americans know of only a handful of U.S. poets, one of them is likely to be Emily Dickinson. She’s described as a kind of nun of poetry — a single woman who stayed home in a white dress writing poems only for herself.

But her full story is more complex. Emily Dickinson was not entirely reclusive; she thrived on her written correspondence, something like people today who spend hours socializing online, and shared her poetry with her inner circle. Despite her voluminous output, very few of her poems were published during her lifetime — and none with her permission. Find out more about this fascinating woman of letters below.

Emily Dickinson Kept Up Lifelong Friendships

Emily Dickinson rarely left the grounds of her home after 1865, when she was in her mid-30s, for reasons that are unclear. But she was social. Scholars have about a thousand of her letters to at least a hundred friends and family members — which may only be a fraction of all the letters she wrote. She often enclosed a poem in her letters. In a 40-year friendship, she sent Susan Dickinson, her brother’s wife, more than 250 poems. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the author of an Atlantic Monthly article that encouraged young people to write, received about 100 of her poems.

Emily Dickinson Stopped Attending Church in Her 30s

In her most famous poem, “I heard a Fly buzz–when I died–”, she takes on a question most of us wonder about at some point: What is it like when we die? In the poem, she imagines people at her bedside waiting for the “King” to “Be witnessed-in the Room.” Instead she hears a fly and then enters darkness.  

Does this suggest a lack of faith? Again, it’s not clear. As a young girl, Emily attended services with her family every week, and participated in daily religious observances at home. Her mother was Calvinist, and in Emily’s teen years, several of her friends and her sister, father, and eventually her brother joined that Protestant movement. She resisted, saying to a friend, “I am one of the lingering bad ones.” By her late 30s, she had stopped attending services. However, her poetry continued to approach religious themes.

Her Father Was a U.S. Congressman

Dickinson was born into a prominent family. Her grandfather, one of the founders of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, overextended himself and lost the family’s land holdings. While most of the family left, her father, Edward Dickinson, stayed in Amherst and worked hard to reestablish the family’s standing. He succeeded, eventually entering politics and becoming a state representative and senator, then a U.S. representative.  

As a child, Emily was afraid of him. She came to see him as “the oldest and the oddest sort of foreigner,” a lonely man, despite his longtime residence in Amherst. However, he was appreciated. After he collapsed while giving a speech in the state legislature on a hot June morning in 1874, and then passed away, the town of Amherst shut down for his funeral.

She Composed Almost 1,800 Poems

Envelopes and scraps of paper suggest that Dickinson wrote notes spontaneously. Relatives say that she wrote at a table in her bedroom and at one in the dining room, where she could see the plants in her conservatory, and recited aloud in private. “I know that Emily Dickinson wrote most emphatic things in the pantry, so cool and quiet, while she skimmed the milk; because I sat on the footstool behind the door, in delight, as she read them,” her cousin Louisa wrote in her journal.

Among her papers discovered after Dickinson’s death were 40 handmade books that included more than 800 of her poems. All in all, she wrote close to 1,800 poems.

Only 10 of Her Poems Were Published in Her Lifetime

While Dickinson was alive, only 10 of her poems were published. Scholars believe that she did not authorize any of the publications, half of which appeared in the Springfield Daily Republican. (All were credited to “anonymous.”) The paper’s founder, Samuel Bowles, was a family friend, to whom Emily had sent about 40 of her poems.

Her White Dress Was Not Unusual

In her late 40s and early 50s, Dickinson wore a white cotton dress with mother-of-pearl buttons that was typical attire at home for women at the time. It could easily be cleaned with bleach. Did it mean anything to Emily that her dress was white? Her survivors chose to have her buried in white, within a white casket, when she died at age 55. It’s also true that the poet heroine of Aurora Leigh, a nine-book novel in verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of Emily’s favorites, wore white. But scholars don’t know if choosing that color had any particular significance for her.

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Undead. Hungry for blood. Centuries-old. Hollywood movie monsters have been keeping audiences awake at night and fearful about turning dark corners for more than seven decades. First popularized on the big screen in the 1930s during the silent-to-sound transition, these iconic black-and-white creations continue to frighten moviegoers and inspire modern updates in film, TV, and beyond. From a blood-thirsty vampire and an oversized ape to a creature lurking from the deep, here are the origins of seven haunting old-school movie monsters.

Dracula (1931)

Universal Pictures hesitated before making a Dracula movie. When first presented with the idea in the 1920s, the studio worried about negative audience reactions to a supernatural tale centering around a bloodthirsty vampire. But then a successful play based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) arrived in theaters, and Universal became desperate for a hit. Dracula was greenlit with the intention of placing silent screen superstar Lon Chaney Sr., known as the “Man of a Thousand Faces,” in the title role. However, Chaney died in 1930. Bela Lugosi, who’d won over audiences in U.S. theatrical productions of Dracula, was subsequently hired to portray the vampire onscreen. His good looks, Hungarian accent, and ability to carry off a tux and cape (attire that had initially been seen on the stage) helped make the movie a hit.

Frankenstein (1931)

Dracula‘s success prompted Universal to search for another monster movie for Lugosi, now a star. The studio opted for Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 book, with Lugosi slated to play Frankenstein’s monster, a dead criminal’s body reanimated by science. Lugosi wasn’t thrilled about a role that called for his face to be hidden under layers of makeup, but he needn’t have been concerned. When James Whale was brought on to direct, he didn’t want Lugosi in the part, and instead selected Boris Karloff. The monster’s makeup was applied by Jack Pierce, who used his skills to create a flat dome on Karloff’s head to reflect the skull surgery the monster would have endured. Other touches, such as neck bolts and shortening the sleeves of Karloff’s coat to suggest long arms, resulted in an unforgettable archetype. Paired with Karloff’s acting abilities, which communicated the monster’s existential pain, this film won over critics and succeeded at the box office.

The Mummy (1932)

Universal soon wanted to feature Karloff in another monster movie: The Mummy. Rather than based on a book or play, this movie was partially inspired by the Egypt-mania that overtook the world following the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922. The screenplay was penned by a former reporter, John L. Balderston, who’d written about the tomb. The film also spoke to fears of a so-called Curse of Tutankhamun, which had supposedly claimed the lives of several people with ties to the tomb’s opening. In the story, an Egyptian priest (Karloff) who was buried alive for trying to resuscitate his dead lover is himself restored to life when someone reads a magical scroll. Karloff appeared onscreen in bandages and in makeup that gave him an ancient, withered face (again thanks to Pierce’s skills). The movie, another hit for Karloff and Universal, installed mummies forever in the pantheon of movie monsters.

King Kong (1933)

Universal featured many cinematic monsters, but wasn’t the only studio to cash in on the phenomenon. In 1933, RKO Pictures wowed moviegoers with a rampaging giant ape known as King Kong. King Kong’s beginnings can be traced to Merian Coldwell Cooper filming exotic locations across the globe in the 1920s. His voyages sparked an idea for a movie that would feature a real gorilla in New York City — but then the Great Depression nixed any notion of getting the funds to shoot abroad or transport a gorilla. Cooper found a job at RKO, where he saw Willis O’Brien using stop-motion animation on another film. Cooper and RKO head David O. Selznick believed that this technique could work for a movie about an enormous ape on the loose in New York City. The result, which Cooper co-directed, was the perennially popular King Kong.

The Wolf Man (1941)

Universal’s Werewolf of London (1935) wasn’t a big hit, but the studio eventually decided to try another werewolf film. In The Wolf Man, Lon Chaney Jr. plays Larry Talbot, who returns from America to his family’s Welsh estate. He’s bitten by a wolf soon after his arrival, which leads to his transformation into the Wolf Man. Screenwriter Curt Siodmak drew on legends of men transforming into destructive wolves, as well as lore that a werewolf emerges during a full moon and can only be killed by silver. The movie’s original title was Destiny, to evoke how outside forces can overshadow personal will. Audiences flocked to the film and empathized with the Wolf Man, cursed with an affliction he cannot control.

Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)

Creature From the Black Lagoon was the last in Universal’s old-school era of monster success. The initial idea for the film came from writer and producer William Alland, who in the 1940s heard a tale about a fish-man living in the Amazon and wrote a story treatment in 1952. But it was the look of the monstrous creature that made the film stand out. This was largely conceived by Milicent Patrick, an artist employed by Universal’s special effects shop (though her male boss claimed credit at the time). For her creature designs, Patrick studied prehistoric life from the Devonian period, a time 400 million years in the past, when some species were leaving the oceans to live on land. Though it had the option to shoot in color, Universal stuck to black and white for this movie; this cost-saving choice links this monster to earlier ones.

Gojira (1954) / Godzilla (1956)

Hollywood wasn’t the only place to birth movie monsters. In 1954, Japan’s Toho Studios released Gojira, about an ancient reptile who was brutally awakened by a nuclear test. Director Honda Ishiro wanted to make the movie in part due to the devastation wreaked by the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Further inspiration came early in 1954, when crew members of a Japanese fishing vessel got radiation sickness due to a nuclear test. Gojira, his name a combination of the Japanese words for whale (“kujira”) and gorilla (“gorira”), was embraced by Japanese audiences. The film was re-edited for its U.S. release. Scenes were added in which Raymond Burr played an American reporter following the story of this monster, but this version erased any message about the dangers of nuclear weapons and testing. Gojira was given a new name as well, becoming Godzilla, King of the Monsters.

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What’s not to love about blue? While not a common pigment in nature — our cave-painting ancestors rarely messed with the stuff — the color fills our days thanks to blue skies and deep blue oceans. Blue has been revered since Neolithic times, and today it remains one of humanity’s favorite shades. Here are six amazing facts about the color that prove why this little slice of the rainbow will always fascinate us.

Your Favorite Color Is Blue (Probably)

Since the first color surveys in the 1800s, blue has been our species’ favorite color overall — and the trend is truly global. One YouGov study from 2015 surveyed 10 countries across four continents, and found that blue reigned supreme in all of them, scoring 8 to 18 percentage points higher than the second-place color. In the U.S., 32% of respondents preferred blue, with men consistently favoring the color (40%) compared to women (24%). Green scored the silver medal, and purple nabbed the bronze. Scientists who study color theorize that this widespread love of blue is likely because it’s often tied to positive experiences, such as Earth’s bright blue skies and oceans. Oh, and humanity’s least favorite color? Dark yellowish brown.

The Sky Is Blue Because of the Color’s Wavelength

The sun sends its rays to Earth as white light, meaning they contain everything in the color spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). But blue is unlike the other colors, because its specific wavelength (between 450 and 495 nanometers) is more frequently scattered by particles in the atmosphere in a process known as Rayleigh scattering. At midday, the sky is pale blue as the sun’s light travels through less of the atmosphere, but as the sun heads toward the horizon, the sky becomes a richer blue because light travels through more of the atmosphere (thus scattering more blue light).

However, this is only half of the answer, because indigo and violet have even shorter wavelengths than blue, which raises the question: Why isn’t the sky violet? Figuring out this conundrum means taking a closer look at the human eye. The cones inside the eye are coded to perceive red, green, and blue (what’s known as trichromatic vision) and it’s the combinations of these inputs that determine variations of color. Because of the eye’s sensitivity to the color blue, the sky takes on that particular hue instead of violet. Other animals likely perceive the sky (and the rest of the world) in a different hue because most mammals are actually dichromatic, meaning they only have two different types of cones.

Blue Eyes Aren’t Actually Blue

Between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago, all humans had brown eyes, until a single genetic mutation caused one human to be born without the usual brown-black melanin pigment that colors irises brown. Irises without this pigment experience what’s known as the Tyndall effect (yes, the same reason why the sky is blue). Because of blue’s short wavelength, that spectrum of light is reflected most by the fibers in the iris, causing eyes to take on a bluish color even though there is no blue pigment present at all. Today about 10% of the world’s population has blue eyes, though that number is skewed heavily by northern Europeans. In Finland and Estonia, for example, 89% of people have blue eyes — the highest percentage in the world. The U.S. comes in much lower at around 27%.

Lapis Lazuli Was a Blue Gem Prized by Many Ancient Civilizations

Many ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, Rome, and India prized a blue gem known as lapis lazuli. The gem appears in the myths of the Sumerians as far back as 4000 BCE, and in ancient Egypt, pharaohs wore the precious stones in pieces of ostentatious jewelry (likely bedecked with other blue gemstones such as sapphire and turquoise).

Lapis lazuli was largely mined in present-day northeastern Afghanistan starting as early as the seventh millennium BCE. The stone appears in some of the world’s earliest civilizations, including the Indus Valley Civilization in India and Pakistan. Lapis lazuli continued playing a role in human culture for thousands of years, even up to the Renaissance, as painters often ground the gem to produce the highly sought-after pigment ultramarine. The pigment was so expensive, even legendary painters such as Michelangelo couldn’t afford it.

There’s a City in Morocco That’s Painted Blue

Chefchaouen is a city nestled in the Rif Mountains of northwestern Morocco. With one of the country’s most popular medinas outside of Marrakech, the city is already on the map for many tourists, but Chefchaouen is also known by another famous moniker — “the Blue Pearl.” That’s because a large portion of the city has been painted various shades of blue.

There is no official story as to why the city is plastered with blue hues, though there are many local legends. Some say the blue color keeps buildings cool, others say it deters mosquitoes, while others still say the blue color honors the importance of the nearby Ras el-Maa Waterfall. However, the leading theory dates back to the 15th century, when Chefchaouen served as a refugee camp for Jews and Muslims fleeing persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. Per Jewish tradition, these refugees painted their homes blue (an important color in Judaism) as a reminder of God’s power. Although the Jewish population has since largely left the area, the Muslim-majority city continued the tradition, and the Blue Pearl continues to shine centuries later.

Your Blue Veins Are Actually an Illusion

Look at your arm, and you’ll see blue veins crisscrossing just beneath the skin. That’s an optical illusion. Human veins are not blue, and are actually transparent. While deoxygenated blood is a darker hue of red (which you’ve likely seen if you’ve ever donated blood or had blood drawn), the blue color comes from your skin scattering light, so that we perceive the veins beneath the skin as blue. The color perception of veins can also change depending on skin tone, as darker skin will turn veins more of a greenish color. While blue blood doesn’t occur naturally in humans, it is found in animals such as the horseshoe crab (whose blue blood has actually saved countless human lives). This family of crab sports blue blood because it contains copper pigments instead of iron.