The weather is turning cooler (mercifully!), the days are getting shorter, the Halloween decorations are up, and that can mean only one thing: It’s time to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Again.

Operative word: again. Because we watch it Every.Single.Year.  We would no more miss the Great Pumpkin than we’d miss buying Halloween candy in September and then having to buy it again a few weeks later because we sampled too many.

Ahem. Anyway.

It’s always the same:

Lucy is as bossy as ever – and dangerous, as she removes the football, causing Charlie Brown to risk spinal cord injury.

Charlie Brown mistakenly gets invited to a Halloween party and gets rocks when he goes trick-or-treating.

Snoopy gets melodramatic crooning at the piano and doing reinactments of World War I aerial dogfights.

Linus sends a warm invitation to the Great Pumpkin to visit him in the pumpkin patch …

… and then he gets questioned and ridiculed by everyone – including Snoopy.

It’s always the same. Year after year.

We love those crazy kids because they never change. Lucy is always bossy, Charlie Brown is always being picked on, Snoopy is always a daredevil, and Linus … oh, Linus, that lovable kid … he never loses his belief that the Great Pumpkin will show up. Even when the Great Pumpkin doesn’t show, Linus picks himself up, dusts himself off, and looks toward the future. “Next year at this same time, I’ll find a pumpkin patch that is real sincere!”

He knows that when you have faith and hope in your heart — and you live with sincerity — anything can happen. (Even his bossy sister, in a surprising and loving moment, goes out to the pumpkin patch and brings him in from the cold.)

With heartfelt appreciation to the Peanuts gang’s creator, Charles M. Schulz, that message is something we can depend on in a world that changes minute by minute. We know Charlie Brown and his friends will continue to be as hope-filled as they are. We never have to worry about a Charlie Brown reboot or a sequel where they turn surly or apathetic.

And that’s a nourishing thought.

(p.s. The Internet Archive has the video online.)