A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

From the Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz

During Advent it’s our aim to share some of our family’s “must-watch” films with a Christmas setting or theme. We hope you will enjoy a revisit to one of our very favorites!, And in case you missed it, our Christmas Special is available again at Word & Song. We hope that some of our subscribers enjoy our little magazine enough to share it as a gift with friends and family, particularly those who might need a bit of respite from the weary world.

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Sixty years ago this last Tuesday, on December 9, our Film of the Week had its birthday, on the CBS television network. There had been many Christmas specials — everybody who could sing or play music had one. Liberace did; and Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Perry Como, and Lawrence Welk, and Bing and Frankie and many more. And Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol enjoyed its most unusual and yet quite faithful rendition, with the nearsighted Mr. Magoo as the grasping and tight-souled buyer of bad debts, Ebenezer Scrooge. But it was the first animated television show to place at front and center the birth of Christ as the true and only meaning of Christmas. That same year, the Sunday morning clay-animation show Davey and Goliath — of very happy memory — featured its own admirable Christmas special, “Christmas Lost and Found,” in which Davey Hansen comes to learn that the holy day isn’t about how he feels, or about presents and decorating the Christmas tree, but about what happened in Bethlehem a long time ago. By the way, every boy my age did an impersonation of the goofy talking dog, Goliath, saying, “I don’t know, Davey,” whenever Davey was about to try to bend the moral rules a little to do what he shouldn’t; but the real voice of Goliath was Hal Smith, whom you might know from his many appearances as the town drunk, Otis Campbell, in The Andy Griffith Show.

Everybody knows the plot of A Charlie Brown Christmas, right? Lucy has organized the gang of children to put on a Christmas play, and has brought in Charlie Brown to direct it, much to everybody’s dismay, because, as Charlie himself says, “Everything I touch is ruined.” But the children seem to have no feeling for the holy day. Lucy wants to be the “Christmas Queen.” She’s already told Charlie Brown that Christmas usually disappoints her, because she never gets for a present what she wants most of all: “Real estate!” Schroeder, the virtuoso at the toy piano, plays an upbeat jazz melody that has all the children dancing and ignoring anything that Charlie Brown says. Charlie’s little sister Sally is zeroed in on ordering things from Santa Claus, and if he can’t get the presents she wants, he can send money instead, because, as she says, “I want only what’s coming to me.”

I think that Charles Schulz was the greatest comic strip artist that America has produced, and he had a long run at his peak, from the late 1950’s to the early 1970’s. During that time, the dog Snoopy was not the focus of the strip, but the boy, Charlie Brown — his loneliness, his failures, his sadness, his intelligence despite his always poor showing in school; but also his vanity, his weakness, and his foolishness. Linus is his only really reliable friend, Linus the natural theologian and intellectual. So in this film, it’s Linus who accompanies Charlie Brown to the tree lot to get a Christmas tree for the play — Charlie having been ordered to get a good tree, preferably something artificial, and God help him if he screws up. But of all the trees that are in the parking lot, Charlie Brown chooses the frailest, the spindliest, the humblest. With what initial result, you can guess. Pay close attention to the children who laugh at the Everlasting Failure. Even the boys Schroeder and Shermy, and even the dog Snoopy, laugh at him, last to leave the stage where he stands in his failure, and somehow their delayed laughter cuts deepest of all. At which point Charlie Brown cries out, “Is there anybody here who can tell me the what Christmas is all about?”

“Sure, Charlie Brown,” says Linus. And he does, from the gospel of Luke.

The film is a real work of art. It’s a minor art form, no doubt, but Schulz insisted on every feature in it: what begins with the pleasant and wistful song of a children’s choir, fit for wintertime and presents, ends with the rousing carol, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” Think of the frail little tree, and the boy who can do nothing right, and that song of glory.

By now I can’t imagine that any living American has not seen A Charlie Brown Christmas. We could not find a clear copy available for this week for free viewing this week, but the show is widely available online.

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