How Underdog Charlie Brown Changed the Meaning of Christmas Forever
A black screen fades up to show an idyllic, if cold, winter setting familiar to all of us who spent our childhood Christmases north of a certain parallel wherein snow was a guarantee: a frozen pond, with snowbanks and hills in the distance, dotted with bare trees, sooty-slate grey clouds hanging low on the horizon in the very middle of dumping their snowy payload on the chilled landscape. As the scene pans left, the slightly-tinny chords of a jazz piano filter out, backed by a lightly brushed snare and underpinned by a barely-there bass. You know what this is without having to think about it — if you don’t recognize the artwork from the comic strip or the children skating on the pond, you know the special from the music alone. It’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, and it’s a classic.
Enough ink has been spent writing about how the special almost didn’t make it off the ground, how the comically low budget and meddling from network execs nearly stymied the whole thing. That’s not the point of this article, though it is important to note. More importantly (at least as far as we’re concerned here), is the fact that this grandaddy of cartoon Christmas specials touts an anti-commercial/religious message during the super commercial 1960s while employing a non-traditional cast of actors and a non-traditional soundtrack to do so. It shouldn’t have been such a hit, and yet it was. Why?
The televised Christmas special as we know it today became a thing in the ’60s. Once upon a time, Christmas specials were re-tellings of the Nativity story or Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or variety shows hosted by celebrity personalities from an increasingly bygone era. They certainly weren’t aimed at kids, and they weren’t meant to be commercial. But with more and more television sets being introduced to comfortably middle-class homes — themselves filled with boomers reaching their preteen and prime-purchasing-power years — TV executives needed something to work with. Peanuts was already an established success in the world of weekly comic strips, so when Coca-Cola sponsored and commissioned a half-hour Christmas special featuring the Peanuts gang, it seemed like a win-win. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz pulled together a story about Charlie Brown’s now-famous seasonal depression, set it to the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s now-classic jazz accompaniment, and a tradition was born.
It wasn’t the only special from the time to ring in this new era of Christmas cartoon classics. Go through a list of the best Christmas specials and you’ll see many mid-century specials, including Rankin/Bass favorites Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Frosty the Snowman (1969), alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas. C. Michael Bailey writes that “during the ’60s, communications, entertainment, and the Judeo-Christian holiday season married, for better or worse, creating the greatest advertising-promotional movement ever conceived before the Super Bowl became the whorish spectacle it now is.” This was the decade when Christmas embraced its commercialism and the enduring status of the non-religious list of favorite TV specials bears this out.
But, you ask, isn’t the anti-commercial theme of A Charlie Brown Christmas an antidote to that? Sure, of course. But if the medium truly is the message, and the medium here is a (secular 1960s) television special sponsored by Coca-Cola, how can or should we view Linus’s recitation of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke? Coke execs circa-1965 might want you to see it as a subtle subversion of Christmas’s religiosity, or a tip-of-the-hat to the “reason for the season.” But in reality, it’s such a sincere moment, made all the more poignant when you realize just how aberrant it is in the scheme of things, that I believe it must be viewed straight on. That sincerity, in the face of the anti-establishment that was becoming so prevalent in the middle part of the decade, is ironically almost more 1960s than Woodstock (the music festival, not the bird).
Today, that sincerity rings a little more craven to some. We live in a culture that is drifting bit-by-bit away from religion. The defenders in the so-called “War on Christmas” often use as a rallying cry that when you get too far away from the meaning of Christmas, Christmas loses meaning. I don’t buy it for a second — there are plenty of secular and even quasi-religious families creating tremendous meaning out of their own, personal celebrations at this time of year. For these secularists, how does A Charlie Brown Christmas — which, clearly, is hearkening back to that bygone era where Christmas was only a religious holiday — still hold onto our hearts? I’d like to believe it’s the power of Peanuts, and it may certainly be, but the fact that Vince Guaraldi’s timeless soundtrack has been certified 3x-platinum and that many of the songs on it are widely considered to be Christmas music classics on their own cannot be ignored.
The beauty of Vince Guaraldi’s score is an understated one. Unlike acid jazz or the fuzz bass so popular at the time, the simple rhythmic structure — piano, bass, and drums — is the perfect musical complement to a story about a depressed boy at Christmastime. The sad, jazzy chords that open “Christmas Time Is Here” bring Charlie’s blues to life; the dancing runs of “Skating” sonically illustrate that bustling skating pond from the opening scene of the special. Even his jazzed-up arrangements of traditional carols — songs which were, at the time, being replaced by the secular carols that have come to hold revered places in the Christmas musical canon — sound better than their straight counterparts. “O Tannebaum” played on the on-beat just doesn’t sound right to my ears anymore.
It would not be a stretch at all to call Guaraldi’s score a bonafide character in the Christmas special as well as the Peanuts gang — “Linus and Lucy,” written for A Charlie Brown Christmas, has now become the official Peanuts anthem — and it’s no surprise to me that the soundtrack is heard on regular rotation in the supermarkets and shopping malls across the country at this time of year. But at the time, like using actual children to voice the Peanuts characters, using jazz as a soundtrack to a primetime TV special was absolutely unheard-of (in much the same way as presenting religion on TV was. Who would have thought that A Charlie Brown Christmas was so groundbreaking?) Jazz wasn’t as popular a genre as it had been in earlier decades, having been supplanted by rock ‘n’ roll, but in its own quietly observant way, jazz did what no other genre could have done for the soundtrack: gave it life.
So this holiday season, whether you scour your TV listings for the precise airtime of this holiday classic or cue up your DVD copy, when you watch A Charlie Brown Christmas — and chances are, you will! — perhaps you’ll have more to think about as you watch Charlie Brown discover the true meaning of Christmas, via a well-timed Bible verse and simple notes of a jazz trio.
