Stream ‘A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving’ Free on Apple TV This Weekend
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Thanksgiving may still be a couple weeks away, but you can get in the spirit a bit early this year as Apple is once again streaming its classic Peanuts holiday special, A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, to everyone, subscribers and non-subscribers alike.
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving will be available in the Apple TV app across all platforms on Saturday, November 14, and Sunday, November 15 — with no subscription required.
The beloved classic, which first aired in 1973, finds Charlie Brown once again hopelessly running to kick Lucy’s football before landing on his back — as usual. Later, Peppermint Patty spontaneously invites herself, Marcie, and Franklin to Charlie Brown’s house for Thanksgiving, despite the fact that he can’t cook much more than toast and already has plans to spend the day at his grandmother’s. Thankfully, Snoopy saves the day with his own version of a Thanksgiving meal before they all go off over the hill and through the woods to the Brown family’s Thanksgiving dinner.
While Apple offers the Charlie Brown holiday specials — and a wealth of other Peanuts content — as part of an Apple TV subscription, it also streams the three most classic of these free for all on key weekends during the holiday season.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was available on October 17–18, 2026; A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is on deck this weekend; and the animated feature that started it all — A Charlie Brown Christmas — will be available for free on December 12–13, 2026.
Sadly, these dates don’t exactly allow you to cozy up with your favorite holiday specials on the actual holidays. You’ll need to be an Apple TV subscriber (or own a copy) if you want to watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving while digesting turkey on November 26. Still, it’s a nice way to get into the festive season, especially with A Charlie Brown Christmas, where pretty much the entire month of December qualifies for many folks.
Apple has continued to offer free streaming weekends for these three specials in recognition of the fact that they’ve long been seasonal traditions for many households. A Charlie Brown Christmas premiered in 1965 and aired every December on network television for 55 years (CBS from 1965 to 2000 and ABC from 2001 to 2019) before Apple acquired the rights to the Peanuts franchise in 2020, raising fears that it would spoil everyone’s holiday fun by putting the much-loved specials behind a paywall.
From the start, Apple promised to air the specials free on Apple TV (or “Apple TV+,” as it was called back then) just like it’s still doing today, but the streaming service was still in its infancy back then. Not everyone had the Apple TV app available, and many still thought of it as an “Apple thing,” leading to the belief that the company was shutting out those who didn’t own any Apple devices.
In reality, the Apple TV app had already been rolling out to modern smart TV platforms and even Roku set-top boxes, and it had also landed on PlayStation and Xbox consoles just in time for that year’s free streaming of A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. Still, it took quite a bit longer to come to Windows and Android, and it’s also fair to say that in 2020, not everyone had a smart TV capable of running the Apple TV app, as the initial cutoff for most was 2019 and newer models.
So, it’s fair to say that there were some valid concerns back then, and following a petition from Peanuts fans that gathered over 250,000 signatures during the 2020 holiday season, Apple partnered with PBS to also broadcast the specials on PBS and PBS Kids stations.
That seemed like a reasonable compromise, since PBS is entirely nonprofit, and Apple understandably wasn’t about to allow the specials to which it now owned exclusive rights to be broadcast on a for-profit station. Even so, it was a limited-time concession, and by 2022, Apple had already decided that the Apple TV app was sufficiently available that fans could rely on that. Or, they could simply subscribe to Apple TV, which the company undoubtedly found preferable.
The specials lived in a fixed time slot during the two holiday seasons they aired on PBS, much like they did in the broadcast days, so fans were better off turning to Apple TV anyway, where they’d be unlocked for free streaming for an entire weekend — and generally before their scheduled PBS broadcast.
You can watch A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving by opening the Apple TV app on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, or even your new Apple HomeView if you’ve just picked one up. It can also be installed on Android smartphones and most gaming consoles and smart TVs, or streamed in any modern web browser by visiting tv.apple.com.
Apple’s Peanuts deal isn’t just about streaming legacy content. The company has been actively producing a plethora of new Peanuts specials under the Snoopy Presents banner, including a brand-new holiday special for 2026, 12 Days of Snoopy, which began streaming yesterday for Apple TV subscribers.
