A Screen Full of Christmas Joy

A Screen Full of Christmas Joy December 22, 2014

a-charlie-brown-christmasBah. Humbug.

It’s easy to get a little cranky around the fourth week of December. Oh, I know. The Christmas season is supposed to be the most wonderful time of the year. Andy Williams says so. But it doesn’t always feel so. In fact, the holidays tend to be a little draining. We’re not quite as busy as the common elf, but we still have shopping to do, parties to throw, ugly sweaters to wear … it can all leave us feeling about as fresh as week-old eggnog.

Movie reviewers have it especially hard.

Oh, stop your snickering. It’s true. See, Hollywood has chosen the Christmas season to push some of its biggest, most prestigious films to market. On Christmas day alone, three anticipated movies—Unbroken, The Gambler and Into the Woods—will be playing at a theater near you. Another four, including big Oscar hopefuls Selma and American Sniper, are coming out in limited release. And we poor critics have to figure out a way to watch all of ’em.

Well, OK. Perhaps that doesn’t sound particularly whine-worthy. But the point is, I feel your pain. I feel your stress. The ol’ Christmas spirit, which I used to feel keenly, is a tough thing to corral for some of us. We just don’t have the time to find it anymore.

It was easier when we were children. I think the fact that we had time to really concentrate on the wonders of the season helped. I remember spending whole minutes (a long time when you’re seven) watching the Christmas tree lights glow off our ceiling, sucking candy canes and shaking every single present  to figure out what was inside. December felt like magic to me.

But it wasn’t just my excess time that made Christmas feel more magical. It was, quite frankly, television.

I loved me those traditional Christmas specials (all of which were made before I was born). I never watched Mr. Magoo regularly, but I loved his 1962 Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol every time it came on. I’d schedule my meager calendar around 1966’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I liked all of those Rankin/Bass shows, but the must-see claymation special was 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

But maybe the best of the bunch was, and in my opinion still is, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which first aired in 1965. The special—the first of many to feature Charles M. Schulz Peanuts gang—never would’ve aired in today’s age of formulas and focus groups. The story is a slow-paced meander through the spirit of the season, not a full-on sprint. Real kids voiced the characters, not professional voice actors. And slapped right in the middle of the show is a telling of the original Christmas story, straight out of Luke. Schulz himself insisted that the Bible be a part of the special—a decision that made even the controversy-wary bean counters of the day very nervous. (Schulz allegedly said, “If we don’t do it, who will?”) CBS officials allegedly thought the special would be a disaster. Instead it won Emmy and Peabody awards and has become one of the season’s true classics.

It’s ironic: All these specials were created to make money. A Charlie Brown Christmas—which is, you’ll recall, an animated lament of the commercialization of Christmas—was originally sponsored by Coca-Cola. And yet in one of the paradoxes of the season, most of these shows hinted that Christmas means a great deal more than just presents under the tree.

I remember Mr. Magoo’s Scrooge wailing beside his own grave (heavy stuff for a kid like me) at his misspent life. I remember Rudolph and Hermey (the wanna-be elf dentist) going off into the world to look for redemption, and finally finding love and acceptance back home. I think of the Grinch and his undersized heart coming to a very real, if somewhat nebulous, understanding of what the season means.

He puzzled and puzzed till his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps … means a little bit more.

All those messages, in their own weird way, helped me understand Christmas a little better. It wasn’t just about the trees and lights and the guy in the red suit. It wasn’t just even about throwing a birthday party for Jesus. It was about what that birth brought into the world—the light and hope I talked about Friday—and there should be something joyous and somber and sublime about the season, something that can’t be easily defined, no matter how much we puzzle and puzz over it.

January should be a pretty busy month around this blog. We’ve got a lot of great messages to talk about from a lot of really good movies. I know you’re all really, really busy, too. But for now, let’s all just take a deep breath and soak in a little Christmas, courtesy Charlie Brown, Linus and a sad little tree.


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