Tonight I was sitting in a restaurant, when one of the TVs in the bar area started the beginning of A Charlie Brown Christmas. Suddenly throughout the restaurant there was a murmur if recognition and a sigh of comfort. Among all the other Christmas traditions, there is something about this half hour that brings Christmas home like none other.
The show exists in dvd form and several digital and cloud rental forms, but I always hear about people who, like pre 1980s rush home to watch the “special” on network television. It’s like recapturing childhood by watching commercials. For many years the special was sponsored by Dolly Madison treats, which don’t exist ant more, but the show does. I also remember a version of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” Coke commercial, though I may be wrong about this.
Charlie Brown’s quest for a non- commercial Christmas is ironic, because of course the special was an immense commercial success, but somehow through the years and through the special’s ability to outlast sponsors, it has transcended it’s own commercial roots.
I’m certain that I know every line of the show by heart. There are no surprises from the ice skating scene to the climactic “That’s what Christmas is all about” scene. Yet I drink in every line the same way I take out well-loved ornaments year after year. The joy is in the familiarity, like so much of Christmas. One of my particular favorite lies is a minor character, Sherman, who says, “Every year its always the same thing. I always play a shepherd.”
Even the voices are precious to me. Remember watching other Peanuts specials with other child actors which were entertaining, but without these child actors, nothing felt right (apparently the voice of Charlie Brown belonged to a child who later went to jail for some white collar crime, but that doesn’t change the appeal).
Christmas is about the familiar. There is a part of me that regresses to the child who couldn’t wait for the night of Charlie Brown and the Grinch and Rudolph. The constant availability of the previously rare Christmas specials does not change their appeal or their ability to bring me back to my childhood.