The 1965 TV special A Charlie Brown Christmas is such a staple of the holiday season that it seems more than a little arbitrary, not to say fruitless, to try to weigh in with an opinion about it. Everyone has seen it countless times, which means that unless you're writing a polemic against it (and, for the record, I'm not), there's really not much anyone can do by way of recommending it. With that said, I still feel it's useful to say something about the way this beloved, twenty-three-minute animated short from more than forty years ago can tell us something about the world today, or at least with regard to how we watch movies.
As created by Charles M. Schultz, the Peanuts comic strip is even more ubiquitous than the TV specials (of which the Christmas one is undoubtedly the finest) it spawned. The spirit of the original source material finds it way into A Charlie Brown Christmas through the screenplay penned by Schultz, with its dispersed yet poignant dialogue setting the pace for the action. The story, such as it is, deals with Charlie Brown feeling disillusioned by his lack of enthusiasm for Christmas, a celebration he admits to not fully understanding. He gives psychoanalysis a shot, paying Lucy a nickel to help with his crisis, but all it gets him is a laundry list of phobias, leading him to conclude that he is afraid of, well, everything. Sensing that Charlie Brown didn't really get his money's worth, Lucy goes on to suggest that he should direct the Christmas play at the school, a position he happily accepts. Now he'll finally have the chance to do something worthwhile, something to take him away from the crass consumerism he's surrounded by--even his dog and his sister have been swept up by this wave.
Underscoring Charlie Brown's struggles with his views on Christmas is Vince Guaraldi's timeless jazz recording, equal parts elegant holiday cheer and painful childhood nostalgia. It's no wonder Wes Anderson used one of these tracks (the vocal version of "Christmas Time Is Here") in the lovely ice cream parlor scene in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) between Royal, the distant father, and Margot, the troubled daughter. And, in the end, it's this sense of achingly beautiful sadness--accentuated not only by Guaraldi's music but by the characteristically simple visual style of the film as directed by Bill Meléndez--that stays with the viewer long after Charlie Brown and friends have fixed up the flimsy Christmas tree he had picked out for the play. The film, by not looking to preach tired old values in the most crude and obvious way possible or even fool us into giving up our money at the box office to sit through another vapid hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, reminds us of the pleasant and noble things about Christmas, which is to say, those that have nothing to do with Christmas as such whatsoever. In short, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a film even a secularist can love.
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