It didn’t occur to me when I started these “holiday traditions” articles with Halloween and Thanksgiving, but, appropriately enough, this is the 50th anniversary of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It has become a bedrock part of the Christmas holiday, and it is one of the finest meditations on this time of year that has ever been made.
I’m not a religious person by any means, so Christmas to me has no particular religious meaning to me. However, Christmas as a holiday is one of my favorite times of the year. I’ve always loved the giddy excitement of Christmas both as a kid and as I grow older and older. I don’t feel any particular need to shift “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays,” and I don’t intentionally skip over the more religious-themed Christmas songs, even if they hold no real meaning for me. I mention this because one of the most well-known aspects of A Charlie Brown Christmas is a speech given by blanket-toting Linus that is a straight bible quote, detailing the “true meaning of Christmas.”
While I have no connection to the more religious aspects of that speech, I can’t say I’ve ever had any problems with the basic message: peace and good will. That, to me, is the timeless quality of this program. Fifty years later and we’re still struggling with the commercialism of the holidays, and we’re still searching for peace and good will for our fellow man. It will be true fifty years from now, and no doubt another fifty after that.
Even without decades of comic strips to inform the characters of Charles Schulz’s work, we get such a concise view into these kid’s lives throughout the less than half-hour runtime of this special. Charlie Brown the worrier. Linus the wise. Lucy the overbearing. Sally the crass materialist. Snoopy the dreamer. These characters are all of us, like a psychiatric atom bomb blowing us into our component parts. We’re all part Sally and Linus and Lucy and Charlie Brown. We’re all Snoopy on one day and Pigpen on another. We’re all Schroeder in front of the piano, focusing on our interests to the point where we drown everything else out. It’s when the pieces come together that we’re greater than the sum of our parts. It takes a Linus to even out a Charlie Brown. It takes a Lucy to pull a Schroeder out of his own obsessions. It takes a Sally to help us recognize the absurdity of it all.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is the first Christmas special I watch, year after year. In a way it signals the beginning of the Christmas season for me, the same as that first sip of eggnog or the first run-through of Nat King Cole’s Christmas Song. While the rest of the season holds visitations with George Bailey and Rudolph and Ebenezer Scrooge (as portrayed by Uncle Scrooge, Michael Caine, and Alastair Sim in the three versions of Dickens’ classic I watch), and Opus and the Grinch, it’s Charlie Brown who brings in the season. From the first moment when the kids are skating on the ice to Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmastime is Here,” I sink into an easy, quite calm. Charlie Brown’s despondent gloom is balanced by the festive delusions of his friends. His hopeful optimism of heading a Christmas play is tempered by the fact that he is, of all the Charlie Browns in the world, the Charlie Browniest. His continued hopes that a little tree needs him are dashed by the cruelties of his peers, and even when the spirit of the season seems to uplift him, he is brought crashing back to earth by a simple Christmas decoration. “I’ve killed it,” he says, the utter despair in his voice like a black hole.
But it is Christmas, after all, and even Charlie Brown is allowed a moment of brightness and hope.
The credits roll, and after twenty-some minutes we’ve experienced the sum totality of humanity condensed and compressed into a simple, linear plot line. Gentle humor, vibrant personalities, simple animation, a depth unmatched by much longer works. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.
I watch a number of Christmas specials each year, but if I had to choose only one to watch, it would be an easy choice. It’s not Christmas without Sally asking for “tens and twenties” and Lucy solemnly stating that she never gets what she really wants, which is “real estate.”
Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown . . . and to all of you as well.