Good Grief
It seems only right to start writing about Christmas specials with the most memorable and well-known special we have – A Charlie Brown Christmas. After it first aired in 1965, it became the most consistently aired Christmas special out there, first appearing annually on CBS and then at least twice during the holiday season on ABC. It won a Peabody and an Emmy, the 40th anniversary airing had the highest ratings in its timeslot, and somehow remains a Christmas classic despite its overt focus on Christianity. This year, President Obama chose to give a national primetime address on the first night ABC was going to play A Charlie Brown Christmas, and got almost as much coverage for bumping off Charlie Brown as for introducing major new Afghanistan policy.
Charlie Brown follows the well-worn Christmas special formula we all know and love. We begin with a protagonist who has not bought into the standard Christmas spirit, and whose contrariness upsets his friends and family who are celebrating the holiday with the appropriate good cheer. Gradually, through the magic of Christmas, Charlie Brown attains the proper sense of joy and good will, and we end by discovering the real meaning of the holiday. I haven’t done a lot of research on this, but my guess would be that we have that other well-known Charlie to thank for this particular Christmas plotline. Christmas as we know it, with its prevailing message of charity and cheer, didn’t exist much before the nineteenth century, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol did a great deal to codify our perceptions of the holiday message.
And yet, in spite of what appears to be a fairly strong correlation with the Christmas Carol plot of the past and the innumerable saccharine Christmas specials to come, A Charlie Brown Christmas is an unlikely hit. While Scrooges and their descendents are usually typified by a perverse delight in their emotional miserliness, Charlie Brown begins with a powerful awareness of his inability to feel Christmas spirit, and is seriously concerned about his own malaise. The first lines of the program are Charlie’s: “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.” Charlie Brown sounds less like a guy in need of chastising visits from Christmas ghosts, and more like a candidate for anti-depressants. The accompanying music, one of the most defining qualities of the program, supports and reinforces his unease. Small children sing “Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer” to a descending, repetitive melody in a minor key that sounds like deep wistful sighs. For a significant majority of its half an hour running time, A Charlie Brown Christmas is a bummer.
Eventually Charlie Brown overcomes his depression by reminding his friends and viewers that Christmas should not be a commercialized wasteland of empty feeling – a theme that must have felt deeply ironic during the program’s original run, when the opening and closing shots carried large sponsorship messages from Coca-Cola. Like all other Christmas specials, A Charlie Brown Christmas ends well, with Linus earnestly reciting the King James version of the Christmas story and Charlie Brown’s pitiful tree turning out rather well. I’m convinced, though, that A Charlie Brown Christmas is as popular as it is not because of its well-worn Christmas moral but because of everything that comes before. Charlie Brown’s feelings of unhappiness and dissatisfaction are so plainly and effectively expressed, they really stand out among the other jokes and Snoopy gags. “My trouble is Christmas…instead of feeling happy, I feel sorta let down.”
He’s so human and believable, and so unlike the reprehensible Scrooge, that I think Charlie Brown gives us a classic Christmas message at the same time as he gives us permission to feel a little down. He’s not some horrible monster who hates crippled orphans or that other holiday favorite, the evil corporate CEO who views Christmas in terms of profits and ignores his adorable children. Charlie Brown is just a kid who feels sort of sad, and says all the things about Christmas we try to ignore. “I feel depressed. I know I should be happy, but I’m not.” No wonder we love watching it every year. If Charlie Brown can get from there to a place where he’s reasonably happy about the holiday, it must be possible for any of us as well.