Hope Springs Eternal in A Charlie Brown Christmas

On December 9, 1965, 45 million Americans tuned in to CBS to watch the premiere of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The half-hour animated Christmas special has aired every year since then. As A Charlie Brown Christmas turns 60 this year, it is worth asking why this program, with its unapologetically Christian treatment of the holiday season, continues to be embraced year after year by a culture that has become increasingly secularized. To arrive at any kind of answer, it is helpful to go back to the origins of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and to the cultural context in which it unexpectedly captivated the hearts of millions of viewers.

In his book A Charlie Brown Religion, author Stephen J. Lind paints a picture of the early- to mid-1960s that might sound eerily familiar to a twenty-first-century ear:

The 1960s saw significant reordering of the status quo. Racial and political hierarchies were challenged, with previous assumptions brought into the light for dissection. Religious orders were likewise called into question. It was not an era of wholesale secularization or abandonment of religion, but institutional authority of all kinds was examined, and that included the church. While for decades it seemed like religion was a required social fixture, legal battles contributed to the strengthening perception that discussing one’s religion was no longer appropriate for social settings.[1]

Yet even in the midst of such cultural currents, Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz had been consistently talking about religion through his daily comic strip, syndicated in hundreds of American newspapers. In fact, Schulz first broached the topic in a strip that appeared on December 21, 1958: Linus is struggling to remember his lines during the school Christmas pageant, where he and his classmates are telling the story of the magi’s journey to Bethlehem. As Linus and Lucy engage in a frantically whispered side conversation, Lucy threatens, “You better remember [your line] right now, you blockhead, or when we get home, I’ll slug you a good one!” Since nothing jogs the memory like the threat of violence, Linus remembers his line just in time, shouting, “The star that shone at Bethlehem still shines for us today!”[2] While this strip makes no explicit mention of Jesus himself, Lind asserts that, because only one other comic strip made a merely vague reference to the biblical Christmas narrative (the rest did not mention it at all), Schulz’s strip would immediately have stood out for its embrace of religious content. Schulz himself was an avid student of the Bible, frequently reading biblical commentaries and leading Bible studies in his faith communities, first at the First Church of God community in Minneapolis and later at the Sebastopol United Methodist Church in San Francisco, where he moved with his family in 1958. Indeed, that year would prove to be a turning point both personally and professionally for the creator of the beloved Peanuts gang: with that first Christmas strip, Schulz embarked on a journey of spiritual reflection and religious discovery through his characters, and in so doing, he invited the readers of his comic strip—and eventually, the viewers of A Charlie Brown Christmas—to open their hearts and minds to an encounter with the God of love revealed in the words of Scripture.

By 1965, Charles “Sparky” Schulz had achieved great success with the Peanuts characters. The previous year, he had begun work on an animated documentary called A Boy Named Charlie Brown, his first collaboration with producer Lee Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez. While the trio was ultimately unsuccessful in selling the documentary to CBS, NBC, or ABC, the fact that Schulz was branching into animation caught the attention of advertising executive John Allen, who, in May 1965, asked Mendelson to develop a Peanuts Christmas special that would be aired on CBS and sponsored by his client, Coca-Cola. Schulz developed the story within days, but over the next six months, both his collaborators and the CBS executives grew concerned over the arc of the plot. By this time, the Christmas holiday special had standard “benchmarks” in the world of television. According to Lind, “the conventions include: emphasis on a universal non-religious ‘spirit of Christmas,’ inclusion of a ‘Scrooge’ character, use of carols as an aesthetic device, centrality of the Christmas tree, and the ubiquitous presence of Santa Claus.” While A Charlie Brown Christmas checks all of these boxes, it does so in an inverted way. Schulz had decided early on that Charlie Brown’s frustration with the commercialism of the Christmas season would form one of the special’s major plot points, thereby demonstrating his desire to buck cultural trends; however, this was peanuts (pun intended) compared to the culmination of his counter-cultural aspirations. Lind’s description of this pivotal moment in the show’s development is worth quoting at length:

If [Schulz] was going to write an entire program to be televised as a Christmas special, he would have to make the program about the biblical foundation of the holiday. Any other option would be a betrayal to his personal convictions. “We’re going to have to have Linus read from the Bible,” he told Bill [Melendez] and Lee [Mendelson]. “Gee, I don’t know if you can animate from the Bible,” Lee Mendelson said. “You know, it’s never been done before.” The unprecedented nature of the content was anything but a deterrent for Sparky. “If we’re doing this show and it’s going to be on at night, I’m going to add some meaning to it,” he told them. “I don’t want it just to be funny. If we’re going to do it, I think we should talk about the true meaning of Christmas—at least, what it means to me.”[3]

One can almost hear echoes of Schulz’s convictions in Charlie Brown himself, who says to his lackadaisical cast: “All right, now. We’re going to do this play, and we’re going to do it right.” While Sparky’s collaborators went along with the idea, they were anxious. At one point, Bill Melendez flatly told him, “We can’t do this; it’s too religious.” Schulz replied simply, “If we don’t do it, who will?”[4] And that was that.

By early December 1965, the special was completed and ready for the executives of CBS and Coca-Cola. At nearly every turn, Schulz had defied their wishes by insisting on a simpler, more authentic presentation: he had written scenes that moved at a slower, more reflective pace than the typically frenetic children’s program. He had eschewed the use of a laugh track and adult actors, instead hiring child actors to perform the dialogue with freshness and innocence (the notable exception being Snoopy, voiced by Bill Melendez himself). He had recruited jazz legend Vince Guaraldi to create what would become a truly iconic soundtrack that seemed to be written more for an introspective grown-up than for children.[5] In reality, Schulz’s aesthetic seemed not to align with Rankin and Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which had premiered the previous year, but to anticipate Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which premiered in 1968. As if the pace, the music, the child actors, and lack of a laugh track were not enough to make the suits nervous (which they did), the key scene, in which Linus proclaims the infancy narrative from the Gospel of Luke, ran for nearly ninety seconds, or six percent of the show’s twenty-five-minute runtime. Ninety seconds with no background music, no background action—just a child standing on a stage in a darkened auditorium, proclaiming the Word of God. The suits were not just nervous; they were petrified. After viewing the final print (just one week before airtime), CBS and Coca-Cola executives considered shelving the program entirely out of fear that viewers “would reject the explicitly religious message.”[6] Ironically, A Charlie Brown Christmas, for all of its emphasis on rejecting commercialism, was ultimately saved by money: an extensive and expensive advertising campaign was already well underway. This, coupled with the imminent air date, stayed the hands of the CBS executives from pulling the plug on the Peanuts. They chose to move ahead with airing A Charlie Brown Christmas, fully expecting it to fail. No one—except, perhaps Charles Schulz—could have predicted the special’s initial overwhelming success, let alone the place it has come to hold in the American cultural zeitgeist at Christmastime. This begs a return to our initial question: what is it about this little show that has captured the hearts and imaginations of people from all walks of life for the past sixty years?

From the first few frames of polka-dot snowflakes and the first few measures of a pensive piano introduction, it is clear that the world of A Charlie Brown Christmas is vastly different from those of its contemporary holiday specials. Glitter and glitz and flashing lights are shunned in favor of the muffled quiet that often comes with snowfall and existential crises. We see the Peanuts gang ice skating on a frozen pond, their directionless meandering underscored by a children’s choir singing cheerful lyrics paired with a poignant melody: “Christmastime is here / Happiness and cheer / Time for all that children call their favorite time of year.” In a matter of seconds, this idyllic scene reminiscent of Currier and Ives is disrupted, juxtaposed with Charlie Brown’s first words to his best friend: “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” Linus replies by telling Charlie Brown that he is the only person “who could take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.” In a later conversation with pop-psychiatrist Lucy van Pelt, Charlie Brown articulates his feelings more clearly: “Actually, Lucy, my trouble is Christmas. I just don’t understand it. Instead of feeling happy, I feel sort of let down.” In a rare display of compassion, Lucy is more helpful than her brother Linus: she suggests that the solution is for Charlie Brown to “get involved in some real Christmas project” and encourages him to direct the upcoming Christmas play. A spark of genuine joy at this invitation brings the first smile to Charlie Brown’s face that we have seen so far, and despite his fearfulness about his own theatrical shortcomings, he accepts Lucy’s invitation and throws himself into the task with trademark earnestness.

Still, as the show progresses, we see Charlie Brown continue to grapple with his sense of malaise. We see his discouragement and dissatisfaction with the commercialistic bent displayed by his friends and family: Lucy wants real estate instead of traditional presents, his baby sister Sally advises Santa Claus to “just send money—how about tens and twenties?” and even his dog Snoopy strives to “find the true meaning of Christmas” by “[winning] money, money, money” through a “spectacular super colossal neighborhood Christmas lights and display contest.” Once Charlie Brown arrives at the auditorium for rehearsal, he encounters more of the same: Schroeder’s music—while perfect for an epic Peanuts dance party—does not quite create the right ambience for the play, Frieda is more concerned about her naturally curly hair than her portrayal as the wife of Pig Pen’s innkeeper character, and all Lucy seems to care about is whether or not she will get to be the Christmas Queen.

Against this backdrop of misguided Christmas spirit, Charlie Brown tries again and again to win his cast over to his vision of what the play could be, even as he struggles to understand Christmas himself. All he knows is that the direction his friends want to take is “all wrong,” and that he does not want his play to be plagued by commercialism, so in a last-ditch effort to restore unity and establish the “proper mood,” he goes in search of a Christmas tree. Despite numerous suggestions to get a great, big, shiny, aluminum Christmas tree (“Maybe painted pink!”), and despite Patty’s snide exhortation to “do something right for a change,” Charlie Brown gravitates toward a small, spindly natural tree that sheds needles whenever it is moved. Even Linus, the philosopher, cautions against this choice: “I don’t know, Charlie Brown. Remember what Lucy said? This doesn’t seem to fit the modern spirit.” Our protagonist disregards this warning and brings the tiny tree back to the auditorium anyway, where he is immediately met with belligerent derision from his cast and even his dog. Humiliated and filled with regret, Charlie Brown says to Linus, “Everything I do turns into a disaster. I guess I really don’t know what Christmas is all about.” Then he cries out to anyone who will listen, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” Into this moment of anguish steps Linus, who simply says, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about.”

The time that has passed slowly thus far seems to stop altogether as Linus, blanket in hand, takes center stage. “Lights please?” he calls out. The auditorium inexplicably darkens and a spotlight appears onstage, and Linus then proceeds to shine the light of the Gospel into the darkness of Charlie Brown’s heart. Everything fades except the clarity and certainty of this child’s voice. The moment is quietly riveting and deeply moving, and we see Charlie Brown in the wings, taking in every word, just as we are invited to do.

As the proclamation ends and the music resumes, Charlie Brown, smiling now, wordlessly picks up his rejected little tree and leaves the auditorium as the children who treated him so ruthlessly moments ago look on in silence. Alone, in the darkness outside, he stops and pauses, closes his eyes, then looks up at the stars. Hearing Linus’ Gospel proclamation in his head once more, he renews his resolve not to let his Christmas or his play be ruined by commercial culture, and in his joy, he skips the rest of the way home.

Charlie Brown’s happiness has been restored by discovering the true meaning of Christmas, but this happiness is fleeting. As he tries to decorate his tree with an ornament liberated from Snoopy’s garish doghouse, the trunk sags under the weight and the treetop bends to the ground. The music stops mid-phrase, and, in arguably the most heartbreaking moment of the entire special, Charlie Brown mutters to himself, “I’ve killed it. AUGH! Everything I touch gets ruined!” He abandons his tree, and seemingly all his hopes for Christmas along with it.

At this precise moment, the rest of the Peanuts gang arrives, perhaps chastened by the memory of their earlier cruelty, perhaps converted by hearing the Christmas story. Linus rights the tree and wraps his blanket around the base, declaring, “I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.” Schulz almost seems to be suggesting that people are like trees—even when they are ugly and bent and nearly broken, they can still be made beautiful by the transformative power of love. The final moments of the special are filled with such transformations: as the children transform a scrawny branch into a spectacular Christmas tree, they themselves are transformed from a hurtful mob to a welcoming chorus. And as Charlie Brown discovers these transformations, he himself is transformed from someone who has practically given up on Christmas to someone who can join the herald angels—and his friends—in singing “glory to the newborn King.”

In a culture increasingly plagued by a sense of despair, A Charlie Brown Christmas offers a perennial vision of hope, and more than the iconic music or the comedy or the nostalgia, it is this vision of hope that is the real though perhaps hidden reason for its continued appeal. For the hope A Charlie Brown Christmas offers viewers of all ages is not a shallow hope for a particular Christmas gift, like Sally’s tens and twenties or Lucy’s real estate, or even like Charlie Brown’s own hope for a successful Christmas play. Rather, it is the true, boundless hope that Linus offers in his proclamation of the kerygma: “For behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be for all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10a–11, KJV). The one who places his or her hope in these good tidings of great joy can withstand any rejection, any disappointment, any failure. This is the hope that does not, that will never disappoint (see Romans 5:5), because this hope is rooted in the love of God made manifest in Jesus Christ. Linus is right. We all just need a little love, and with the birth of Christ, that love is made available to us in a way that is completely new, and that has the power to make us completely new too. “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

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