A Response to Josiah Gogarty

Over at GQ, Josiah Gogarty has a delightful little reflection on the music of A Charlie Brown Christmas. You should of course read the whole thing. And if you haven’t seen it, you should go out of your way to watch the special and then pick up the album. (I’ve linked the CD rather than the streaming option, but I’ll leave a discussion of “ownership” vs “access” for another post.)

In his excellent piece, Gogarty gets a lot of things right: the music is excellent; Christmas is a complex season; and A Charlie Brown Christmas unites those two facts in a way that most Christmasy things don’t.

Where the reflection could have used some more nuance is the recognition that Christmas is even more complex than described in the article. Yes, some people are lonely on Christmas, and yes there can be a nostalgic glow, and yes family and friends and resisting materialism and so forth.

But what gets waved away in the article is the point of A Charlie Brown Christmas and its music: to look beyond itself to the God who came down. Christmas is complex because it involves creation, sin, redemption, and the call to a new life. It is complex because of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ that overshadows all things. A Charlie Brown Christmas is really a remarkable cultural artifact if for no other reason than that it explicitly recognizes this truth, without the imagery of a Die Hard or the bluntness of a Christmas song. That A Charlie Brown Christmas is also well-made and has stood the test of time for the last half century is proof that it has tapped into something lasting. And while “complexity” is certainly a part of longevity, it doesn’t explain the fullness of why this is such an excellent show.

So read the article on GQ and appreciate the quality of A Charlie Brown Christmas, but also be aware that the goodness of the special runs far deeper.

Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and teaches Political Science, Philosophy, and History in Southwest Missouri.