A Charlie Brown Christmas: A Masterpiece of Holiday Film

By: Daniel S. Burton

Charles M. Schulz’s A Charlie Brown Christmas is beloved worldwide by children and adults alike. The question is: why? The studio, in fact, nearly cancelled the film in fear of its melancholic tone, amateur voice acting, and use of religious allusion. As it turns out, the film’s melancholy through children is its greatest hold to relatability and brings A Charlie Brown Christmas closer to the truth of the holiday than any other special.

The film illuminates the realities of Christmas many holiday films choose to neglect. The holidays are often an isolating season as one matures into adulthood; young Charlie Brown depicts the disillusionment from childlike wonder and becomes depressed about the point of the holidays. Life, it seems, is losing its light, and when it dies out, just what is left of Christmas? This existential doubt pervades the opening minutes of the film as Charlie and Linus appear as the sole focal point amidst a vast background of nothingness and swirling snow.

As the film progresses, Charlie Brown gradually begins to rekindle his love for Christmas. It is the simplicity of this revitalization that conveys the importance of the simple things, of truth, and of personal perspective and relationships. The iconic Charlie Brown Christmas Tree symbolizes genuine connection to childhood and pure love, amidst a field of giant, garish, fake metal trees, representing the industrialization of the modern holiday. Charlie Brown, though others around him desire the faux celebration (a metal tree) chooses the little old-fashioned tree, decorated in mismatched ornaments, encapsulating that theme of true, uncorrupted passion for Christmas.* The tree’s amateur decoration, like the amateur voices that tell this very story, represent the voices of the children at home and all of those who once strung a bulb too big for a branch.

The brilliant and innovative jazz score of Vince Guaraldi is the finishing culmination of the story’s themes. Each song weaves the melancholy tone and retro yet eerily relatable voice acting of the young protagonists into a somber but hopeful holiday anthem. A Charlie Brown Christmas presents the complexity of childhood Christmas with the tactful depiction of a Christmas concert and the distillation of religious tradition into a single heavy-handed monologue that speaks more to believe in the holiday and one another. Community brings the children together, ramps Guaraldi’s score into a final celebration, and has left real-world communities dancing ridiculously along with the head-bops and arm-pumps of the Peanuts crew for years to come.