As we look at 2019 in the rear view mirror, we see 2020 fast approaching through the windshield. I heard someone comment the other day, “I sure hope that 2020 is a better year than 2019 was.” I think for different reasons we all might say the same thing. 2019 (and really the whole 2010’s decade) was a mixed bag of good and bad. Yesterday on CBS Sunday Morning (proclaimed by Bill Hill to be “The best thing on TV”—a statement I have always agreed with) comedian Jim Gaffigan said “2020! It can’t be 2020-what are we-The Jetsons?!” Another statement I agree with. It’s mindboggling that it’s 2020-yet here it is.
I suppose people have always had similar thoughts every New Year: “1965! How can that be! Surely we’ll soon be able travel to the moon and back!” I’m not sure that we face the crazy notion of the year 2020 with the same optimism and excitement for the future that most folks had in the mid 1960’s. For the time, the 60’s were full of rapid acceleration and change. And, yet, 1965 saw the birth of a Christmas tradition that nearly didn’t come to fruition because it seemed woefully out of step with the modern, fast paced days of 1965. I am speaking of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” One of my favorite seasonal stories is how one of the best things TV ever produced nearly didn’t happen. In fact animator Robert Smigel (of Saturday Night Live fame) called it “the greatest half-hour that American TV has ever produced.”
I was thinking of this when I heard that the man responsible for bringing it to life, Lee Mendelson, died on Christmas Day (which seems somehow appropriate). Mendelson was the last to die of the four people responsible for bringing the show to life: Charles Schulz, Vince Guaraldi who did all the music, and animator Bill Melendez. Mendelson is the one who convinced the creator of the Peanuts, Charles Schulz, to do an animated Christmas special. At first Schulz didn’t want to, but was persuaded. And so “A Charlie Brown Christmas” first aired in 1965 with nearly half of all Americans watching it. The next year when it aired nearly 65% of American homes tuned in. It has aired every year ever since and is, by all accounts, a truly great show both for retaining the spirit and message of Christmas as well as for being a study in simple story telling. But when it first aired, though viewers loved it, it was nearly ridiculed by TV critics because the animation was considered crude and the voices sounded like children. This was because the voices were actually children. There were a few demands Schulz had when he agreed to do the show. One was that the voices had to actually be children and not adult actors sounding like children. This is why the voices seem wooden and, well, childish. Schulz also insisted that there be no laugh track. He also demanded that the music be written and performed by San Francisco jazz legend Vince Guaraldi. There has never been a better soundtrack of Christmas music every produced in my opinion.
The other thing Schulz insisted on was to have Linus read the Christmas story right from the Bible in Luke 2. Mendelson actually tried to get Schulz to not include that in the script for fear that it would never get greenlighted by the CBS executives. Yet, as Mendelson recalled to the LA Times, “Charles Schulz just looked at me very coldly with his blue eyes and said, ‘If we don’t do it [tell the true meaning of Christmas], who will?’” When it was screened the CBS executives sat in stony silence. They thought it was too slow and too religious with the wrong music and the wrong message. But it was too late to change anything and so they aired it. How humbling must it have been to have been so wrong on everything!
And now here we are some 53 years later and there is still the ever present wrangling between the real meaning of Christmas and the secular holiday it has been turned into. I am so thankful that Charles Schulz was a Christian and insisted on keeping Christ in his Christmas show. And his question is a good one for us as we face yet another new year and decade. When it comes to telling others about Christ: “If we don’t do it, who will?”
May we tell the story and live it loudly this year. 2020! Time’s moving too fast! In the words of George Jetson: “JANE, STOP THIS CRAZY THING!” Happy New Year
Chris Higgins 