Charlie Brown: I don’t care. We’ll decorate it and it’ll be just right for our play. Besides, I think it needs me.
One late November, while searching for a fresh evergreen tree to cut down for Christmas, my hubby and I came upon a beautiful Scotch Pine standing all by itself on the farm, surrounded by stumps of dozens of other trees that had already been taken home.
It was a gorgeous colour, rich shades of green and blue that we’ve rarely seen in an evergreen. But it was missing one-third of a side, where I guess it had been crowded out by a larger tree.
I looked it over while my hubby prowled around for something more conventionally shaped, but my heart was drawn to this lonely tree. It was the perfect size and diameter, and shape, if you looked at it from its good side. I couldn’t step away from it – we had to give this tree a good home. Hubby thought I’d lost my marbles, but I proclaimed it our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree. I think he was a bit embarrassed to drag it to the checkout.
We brought it home, trimmed a bit off the bottom, and secured it in its stand. Once decorated and pushed into place in the corner, where the deformed side wasn’t visible, it was a truly beautiful tree.
Such is the power of a good story, and the television special A Charlie Brown Christmas has held a place in thousands of hearts ever since it made its unceremonious debut in 1965. Almost everyone involved in the production thought it would bomb, but it quickly became a phenomenon.
I suspect modern viewers enjoy the special without understanding what a time capsule it is.
Charles Schulz modelled the setting and activities after his childhood memories of Christmas in Minnesota. Yet here in Canada we experienced so much of the same, which may be part of the show’s appeal for the Boomer generation.
When I was a kid, winters were always snowy. We could easily build snow forts during recess, and having a snow day every winter wasn’t uncommon. My dad, like so many fathers, constructed an ice rink in our back yard every year, as soon as the weather turned toward freezing temperatures. Ice skates were a typical Christmas gift. There was also a pond behind my elementary school that promptly froze every year, and during recess and lunch a lot of us were out there sliding around.
School plays were a regular event around the holidays; I remember participating in several, including reciting ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (officially titled A Visit from St. Nicholas) with my entire class in a drafty community hall in Northern Ontario – we all wore our jammie ‘costumes’ over regular clothes to keep warm.
Silvery artificial Christmas trees were a thing. My great-aunt had one, hung with ornaments in shades of blue, and I thought it was one of the most beautiful, ethereal things I’d ever seen. However, the Charlie Brown special, in which Charlie disparaged such trees, sadly led to their disappearance off the market within a couple of years. I’ve been delighted to see them experience a nostalgic comeback in the past few years.
Ironically, you can buy replicas of the tree that Charlie Brown did buy in the show and tried to decorate.
In the show, you can truly see city life as it was in the 1960s – less crowded, quieter, fewer and more modest homes, children walking safely everywhere (even after dark). There’s a lot about that time period that I really miss.
On the other hand, I own a copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas on DVD, as well as a CD with all the music. This became critical when Apple TV+ acquired exclusive rights to all Peanuts-related media in 2020 and wanted to run the shows only for its subscribers. That caused a considerable kerfuffle, and Apple TV+ agreed to run that show and two other Peanuts holiday specials for free during a brief three-day window, in partnership with PBS. Bah humbug! It wasn’t much of a concession to begin with, and then PBS lost its broadcast rights two years later, ending the special’s 57-year run on broadcast television. Fans are at least still able to enjoy the show through in-home technology.
The music from the show is instantly recognizable. It was composed by American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi, who was originally contacted by television producer Lee Mendelson to produce music for a documentary about the Peanuts comic strip, which had become enormously successful a decade after its debut, and its creator, Charles M. Schulz. That special was never aired, but when the Coca-Cola company commissioned a Peanuts Christmas special in 1965, Guaraldi was brought back to score it.
He composed most of the music, creating the most iconic piece of the entire show, “Linus and Lucy”, to be the theme. A handful of traditional carols, such as “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”, lent weight to the score, along with Linus’ soliloquy about the true meaning of Christmas. It highlighted the feeling, even back then, that the holiday was becoming too commercial. Imagine what Charlie and Linus would make of the world now, where pervasive media has allowed a bombardment of holiday advertising.
Perhaps the true magic of A Charlie Brown Christmas is its gentle reminder that the holiday is about kindness, sharing and time spent with the people we care about.