A Charlie Brown Christmas
If you're like most Christmas-celebrating Americans, this week finds you frantically searching for last-minute gifts. Maybe you your schedule was thrown off by the big east coast blizzard, someone slipped your mind, or you were guilted into it when someone you had deemed ungiftworthy unexpectedly got you something. Whatever it was, last-minute shopping is stressful and generally no fun and you still have to wrap those suckers and make sure they get delivered on time.
But what do presents and the materialism they encourage really have to do with Christmas? That's the question vexing Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas, the 1965 holiday classic that boldly yet gently addresses the emotional and spiritual effects of the ever-increasing commercialization of Christmas.
Charlie Brown's admission of his Seasonal Affective Disorder, followed by Linus' harsh rebuttal, isn't how you would expect one of the most beloved Christmas television traditions of all time to open. It's amazing how melancholy and introspective A Charlie Brown Christmas is. There are few references to presents, Santa is hardly mentioned, and there's a fairly solemn and thoughtful reading from the Gospel of Luke right in the middle of it. For a special that was originally sponsored by Coca-Cola, A Charlie Brown Christmas is decidedly non-commercial. The Peanuts characters appear here, in their first television appearance, with all of the humanity that Charles Schulz gave them on the printed page.
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