12 Days of Cinematic Christmas #1: A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Directed by Bill Melendez. Written by Charles M. Schulz.

There was an old VHS commercial that I would always watch growing up promoting the Peanuts TV specials finally coming to home release, and I’m pretty sure I can recite it from memory from the number of times I watched it as a kid. The part that always stuck out to me as a kid was when this man in his late 30s/early 40s talks about how “as a kid there was nothing more disappointing than realizing that you’d missed the Peanuts special”: it’s kind of comical in retrospect seeing this man give his two cents next to a bunch of 4-5 year olds but it also perfectly encapsulates how much these specials have meant to so many kids ranging from the 1960s to the 1990s to today. Before I was introduced to the Star Wars trilogy, before the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there was the Peanuts “Holiday Trilogy” of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973), and the one that started them all, A Charlie Brown Christmas. Even though they were best watched around the time of their corresponding holiday, they were so entertaining that they honestly could be played any time of the year and I’d still have to watch the entire thing.

The staying power of Charlie Brown Christmas really makes sense when you look at the state of cartoon animation on television at the time: you either had sitcoms like The Flintstones that emulated previous popular shows like The Honeymooners or you basically had Looney Tunes or Looney Tunes by a different name. Then all of a sudden you have this melancholy animated Christmas special with a jazz score where these kids discuss how Christmas has gotten “too commercial” and the main character talks about how the holidays depress him. Most of the crew involved believed it would be a disaster.

And yet it was a huge hit, and ended up winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Program and remaining a huge ratings draw for decades to come. It launched a franchise of many more specials to come, each of them indebted to the legacy of this 25-minute episode of television. In 2011, Stephen Pastis, the creator of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, even tried to make a modern Peanuts special that would emulate the feel of Charlie Brown Christmas down to how they casted/recorded the voices. But the influence doesn’t stop there: in Matt Zoller Seitz’s excellent book on Wes Anderson’s filmography he points out how much A Charlie Brown Christmas influenced the director’s entire style, from the specific left-to-right tracking shots to samples of Vince Guaraldi’s iconic score to even the way characters recite dialogue. Every scene and moment is so iconic from this special that it’s been parodied to death, and yet that only furthers its status as a bona fide holiday classic.

The secret to the special’s success is its simplicity and sincerity: the characters are only acting like they do in the comic strip but with the authentic voices of the children portraying them (except Snoopy, who is voiced by director Bill Melendez) it lends the story a charming aura that immediately draws you in. Right from the get-go, the special begins with Vince Guaraldi’s fantastically mellow song, “Christmas Time is Here” and only continues to drop bangers like “Linus and Lucy” and lovely renditions of classic Christmas songs. Charlie Brown’s journey to find the true meaning of Christmas only gets more and more poignant as the decades have gone by as Christianity is farther and farther removed from the idea of Christmas in the public eye: Linus’ recitation from the Gospel of Luke later in the special is as important as it is refreshing for Catholic families who watch it together every year.

A Charlie Brown Christmas isn’t a fully fledged feature film like most of the films that will be on this list, but I challenge you to find one that is as engaging, witty, and iconic as this one (especially in so short a runtime). Watching it around Christmastime is simply an absolute must.