Apparently A Charlie Brown Chrsitmas isn’t unanimously celebrated, a grave oversight on the part of the American public. 

When a teacher of mine asked the class who’d like to watch it, only a measly two people raised their hands. So, we didn’t watch it (also, evidently it’s only available on Apple TV). 

This led me on a quest to satisfy that awakened childhood longing, and I ended up spending that class watching a documentary on how it was made. 

Apparently, it was sponsored by Coca-Cola, which is very ironic given that a major theme of it all is rejecting ‘a commercial Christmas.’ I would assume that flew over an ever-preoccupied Coca-Cola, but maybe they conceded to the dig with a kind of self-aware shrug. 

This is the kind of ambivalence characteristic of Charlie Brown himself, after all, unchanging until the very end.

It’s a marvel to me how in twenty-five minutes such an arc as his is established and then lovingly concluded. 

As Charlie Brown at the top of the show rambles on about seasonal depression, commercialism, pantophobia (the fear of everything, Lucy says), and a dreadful more, it’s hard to see how things could ever look up for this poor boy. Yet, the more I age the more I find myself understanding, falling into the same traps.  

It’s a pity that my generation hasn’t discovered this gem, because I think it speaks to many of us particularly. 

To get Charlie out of his lull, Lucy prescribes involvement, and she’s not wrong in that being a pretty decent home remedy. Charlie becomes the director of the neighborhood Christmas musical, and there finds a sense of community. 

It does him well for all it lasts him, however this isn’t long. Soon, children being children, they become fed up with him and throw him out.

At this point: enter Linus, the soul of the production. In an impromptu speech he talks of “what Christmas is all about.” Following, for the first time in the entire twenty-two minutes preceding, Charlie smiles, as he wraps his woebegone little tree in a blanket of childlike innocence and protection.

Who’s to say whether he resumed his seasonal depression after this little interlude, but he undoubtedly found relief in that moment. This is quite how Christmas feels in general, a fleeting time of merry reprieve, so in that way I’d say how it captures “what Christmas is all about” is subtle and simply masterful. 

This time of year is difficult for many, and though the afflictions of Charlie Brown were probably somewhat taboo in the 60s, they are hopefully less so now. 

Season depression and the unshakable feeling that you’re “just not as jolly as the rest of us” is given a validating nod in this little special, but more meaningful than that it gives careful watchers a resolute response: just enjoy it.

We have all year to contemplate how commercialism is an unrelenting force which poisons America’s dearest traditions; we have all year to self-diagnose ourselves with every kind of phobia in the DSM; let up on it for one day, and enjoy the pause for as brief as it may be. 

The juxtaposition between childhood and adulthood is clear. Charlie Brown is a sour man in a little boy’s body. But then, save room for his foil: Linus, a wise old man, also in a little boy’s body.

Only as a souring adult can I recognize the underpinning message of this holiday special: growing old does not exclude you from your childlike innocence. It’s there, beneath your phobias and seasonal affective disorder and preoccupation with “the way this country is headed.” 

Age does not have to be synonymous with souring, it just so often is, and the less miserable and much preferable alternative seems to be wisdom, perfectly embodied by Linus. 

Every year I watch this, the more I see, and that’s the way it should be. The miseries that may pursue me in the New Year should be of little matter, then, so long as by next Christmas I see more than I have before.