TV series come and go, sometimes in the blink of an eye. However, there are some things that continue to shine bright year after year, traditions that you look forward to, especially around the holidays. Since the 1960s, one of those traditions has been to see the Peanuts holiday specials—“It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” for Halloween, “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” for Thanksgiving and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” for Christmas.

Every holiday has included allowing Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and an assortment of other characters into our living rooms for an evening of fun, an escape from reality and a chance to come together as family. Even as more modern cartoons and holiday spectaculars came into existence, you could always count on Charlie Brown to find a scrawny tree for the Christmas pageant or Linus sitting out in the pumpkin patch right on your television.

That’s not going to be the case this year, though. In a year jam packed with a coronavirus pandemic, racial strife and even murder hornets, the world decided to monkey with the long-standing holiday tradition of Peanuts and family nights. Good grief, it’s like the last sign of the apocalypse.

For decades, the specials appeared on ABC before each holiday. Now, however, Apple TV has purchased the rights to air the specials on its streaming service, taking them off network television where everyone knew they could go and find them. Judging from the reaction online, you might as well drive a stake through Snoopy’s heart.

It doesn’t end with the holiday specials, however. Apple has purchased the rights to “all things Peanuts,” according to various news reports, which means all the television specials, series, movies and more are going to be heading for a streaming service that you have to pay a subscription for. Who’s the blockhead that came up with the idea? It just seems very limiting.

Apple is quick to point out that there will be small windows where the holiday specials will be available free of charge, even if you don’t have a subscription. While that’s awfully Christmas spirit-y of the company, it still takes away the magic—the anticipation of sharing something from your past with your children, something without the foul language, adult themes, violence and more.

That can be irritating on its own, but to do it in the year 2020, when most events have been postponed, cancelled and occasionally obliterated, you might as well just put color bars on the television screen until the new year. After seeing all the political drivel on television, I was looking forward to taking a break and watching the innocence of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

This is coming from someone who constantly immersed himself in all things Peanuts, who loved reading the comic strips, collecting the books containing the comics and watching the cartoons whenever I came across them. Even now, I have several stuffed Snoopy animals in my home, along with a sizeable Woodstock. To jar Peanuts fans like this is like telling children there’s no such thing as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

Of course, the Peanuts specials are not the first holiday tradition sent down in flames. Who remembers when “The Wizard of Oz” used to be a Thanksgiving staple. Before football games dominated network television during the holiday, families used to gather around their sets to watch a little girl in a blue gingham dress go gallivanting down the yellow brick road, a tradition that my mother hated growing up.

The Oz tradition started in 1959 and continued until 1991, when alternative ways to view movies came up. With video cassettes and later DVDs and Blu-Rays to watch your films in perpetuity, there seemed to be no need to carry on the tradition.

I have the DVD for “The Wizard of Oz.” I have DVDs for all of the Peanuts holiday specials, too, with family members constantly buying me copies even though I already own them (Note to family: I love you, but buy me something else this year).

Even with owning the specials, though, I still made a point when I could to watch the “Great Pumpkin” and all of the others on television. In a way, it was keeping my childhood alive and allowing me to go back to a simpler time when I could lose myself in a humorous cartoon for a half-hour. Having that shift to a streaming service like Apple TV is like yanking my childhood away and telling me to grow up.

Fat chance that’ll happen.

Nonetheless, it’s sad to see a holiday tradition dismantled, especially in a time where the “new normal” is throwing everything into chaos. There’s not a lot that people are looking forward to as even plans for trick-or-treating and holiday feasts are in jeopardy. It would have been nice to turn on the television and see the Peanuts gang take us out of this cruel world for a bit. Like Charlie Brown says at the end of his baseball season, maybe next year.