10 / 10
Official trailer
A Charlie Brown Christmas is Bill Melendez’s 1965 American animated television special depicting Charlie Brown’s depression at the commercialization of the Christmas season and his attempts to direct a Nativity play with the Peanuts ensemble.
Peter Robbins voices Charlie Brown. Christopher Shea voices Linus. Tracy Stratford voices Lucy. Kathy Steinberg voices Sally. Charles M. Schulz wrote the teleplay from his Peanuts comic strip characters. Coca-Cola Company commissioned the special and CBS broadcast it on December 9, 1965. The Vince Guaraldi Trio composed and performed the jazz score.
The special has aired annually on American television every year since 1965, the longest continuous run of any Christmas television special.
I can’t think of a thing I’d change in this special. It’s sad and funny, it looks cheap in all the right ways, and it has the nerve to stop the show so a child can recite a Bible passage. Every choice CBS thought would sink it is a choice I’d fight for.
Schulz, Melendez, and producer Lee Mendelson made several decisions that CBS executives believed would doom the special. Children voiced all the children. A jazz score replaced conventional cartoon scoring. Linus delivered an unedited Luke 2:8-14 King James Bible passage as the special’s emotional climax. The production lacked a laugh track. CBS scheduled it expecting failure. The broadcast reached forty-five percent of American households and won both the Emmy and the Peabody. The choices that executives believed would fail were the choices that the audience recognized as real.
The Christmas-television canon was permanently reshaped by the special’s success.
Linus’s Speech
Linus’s recitation of Luke 2:8-14 is the special’s emotional center and its most consequential single choice. CBS executives had asked Schulz to remove the passage. Schulz refused, arguing that the Christmas-meaning question couldn’t be answered without quoting the Christmas story directly. Christopher Shea delivers the passage as a six-year-old child reciting from memory instead of performing.
The choice of King James phrasing instead of modern translation gives the recitation its distinctive cadence and weight.
The passage’s middle phrase, ‘and the angel said unto them, Fear not’, requires Linus to drop his security blanket at exactly the line where the angel tells the shepherds not to fear. The visual gesture against the textual content is the special’s quietest sermon. Schulz never explained the blanket-drop publicly but the choice is widely understood by viewers.
That blanket drop gets me. I think it’s the finest single gesture in any animated special, a boy letting go of the thing he never lets go of at the exact moment he says fear not, and nobody on screen remarks on it.
For Writers
Sustained respectful treatment of source material that producers believe will alienate audiences can become the production’s strongest single element. Schulz’s defense of the Luke passage made the special.
Vince Guaraldi’s Score
Vince Guaraldi composed and performed the score with bassist Fred Marshall and drummer Jerry Granelli as the Vince Guaraldi Trio. The jazz score was new for animated television in 1965 and shapes the special’s tone permanently. The instrumental ‘Linus and Lucy’, the ice-skating sequence cue, and the children’s voices on ‘Christmas Time Is Here’ have become Christmas standards through television exposure.
Guaraldi’s piano carries the special’s emotional vocabulary more than the dialogue does. The melancholy of the opening, the comic energy of the school-play rehearsal, the reverent stillness of Linus’s recitation, the final ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’ chorus: each emotional state is established musically before the visual or dialogue work begins. The score is the special’s emotional structure.
The score by itself would get a 10 from me. Guaraldi’s piano is melancholy and playful at once, and I think it’s the reason the special feels grown-up without ever getting heavy.
For Writers
Scoring choices that depart radically from genre conventions can permanently shape what a genre considers possible. Guaraldi’s jazz proved that animated children’s television could carry serious musical material.
The Christmas Tree
The small spindly Christmas tree Charlie Brown selects has become an instantly recognized object in Christmas iconography. Its tilting, sagging weight under a single red ornament has been reproduced as merchandise, as actual Christmas tree decorations, and as visual reference in later films and television. The tree is the special’s central metaphor for the rejected and the overlooked.
The closing sequence, where the Peanuts ensemble decorates the small tree with Snoopy’s doghouse decorations and gathers around to sing ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’, is the special’s emotional resolution.
The tree gets decorated where it stands, and it becomes beautiful because somebody bothered. As a metaphor for Charlie Brown’s own depression and recovery, it’s the special’s quietest and most generous theological position, and it’s the part that moves me most.
For Writers
Central metaphors in family-aimed productions work when they hold their literal and symbolic tones at the same time. The Christmas tree is both a tree and a stand-in for everything the world has decided isn’t good enough.
Craft Note
Bill Melendez directed and provided the voice of Snoopy as well. Lee Mendelson produced and went on to produce all later Charlie Brown specials. The animation was simple and limited, partly through budget and partly through deliberate aesthetic choice. The special cost approximately seventy-six thousand dollars to produce, a small budget even by 1965 television standards. The annual broadcast continued on CBS through 2000 and then moved to ABC. It has held the special’s broadcast rights since.
Does A Charlie Brown Christmas still hold up?
A Charlie Brown Christmas is the most consequential Christmas television production ever made, and it’s a 10 because every piece of it holds: Schulz’s teleplay, Guaraldi’s score, Linus’s speech and that sagging little tree. Later productions have kept trying to imitate it and never matched it. What I treasure most is that it risked sadness and sincerity when the network expected failure, and the audience rewarded it. I’d put it on anybody’s December schedule without a second thought.
