It’s Waiting for Godot, brought to you by Coca-Cola. In a quintessential mid-century dilemma, Charlie Brown doesn’t have to do anything he just has to change the way he feels. The call to adventure has been issued! But it’s more of an “inside” job. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that. “I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” Linus gives him an alarmed look, and they start walking again. And at last there is some dialogue, as Charlie Brown says, “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. After a while, they come to a low brick wall, and Charlie Brown clears some snow so they can rest their elbows on top of it. As they turn onto another street, the camera pulls far back, and you get a sense of how big the town is and how small the boys are in it. Charlie Brown and Linus walk over what seems a long distance, their ice skates slung over their shoulders. The children have their own work, and they are left, undisturbed, to do it. Lights shine from houses the grown-ups are in there, creating and protecting the world of newspapers and breakfast tables, and everything else.
We watch them leave a house through the back door, walk down two steps, and cross a snow-covered yard then they pass through the gates of a chain-link fence and it begins: They leave the realm of parents and walk out into the night, which magically belongs to the children. But Charlie Brown and Linus aren’t with them as ever, they are both of the group and apart from it. The Peanuts gang is skating on a frozen lake in the nighttime, while a Christmas song plays in a minor key. In a minute and a half of unhurried exposition, the territory of the special is laid out. In those days you had three networks, and if one of them was broadcasting a show for children at night, you can bet that the news had been shouted down school stairwells and across playgrounds, and you can bet that all of us were in position, sitting on family-room carpets and living-room couches, breathing as one, soaking it all in.
In that time, television was not an endless range of possibilities, every watcher a Prospero, conjuring up visions on command. Millions of children knew and loved it, so half of the work was already done: We knew that Lucy was crabby and Sally was romantic and Schroeder was single-minded. The special was first broadcast in 1965, when Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoon strip was in the initial flush of its stupendous popularity (the characters had been on the cover of Time magazine that spring ), syndicated in hundreds of American newspapers. My earliest grasp of how Christianity worked came from the Charlie Brown Christmas special-funny, cool, beloved by all. It was the most wonderful, extremely tense time of the year. The brief-transmitted in the silent language of the family-was to be happy, because our parents had had terrible childhoods, and instead of working out their pasts in psychoanalysis or “involvement,” they threw themselves into these perfect Christmases. My sister and I understood that our feelings about Christmas were very important to our parents. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny reigned over us, with great kindness and generosity, and if we came, eventually, to a crisis of faith, we dealt with it privately.
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Before that, my parents-especially my mother-actively worked to keep me and my sister free from religion, Christianity in particular. My parents were atheists I knew almost nothing about Christianity as a child, although I got the lay of the land when I was sent to Catholic school in sixth grade. A prelude to something sacred in an unlikely place: the Gospel of Luke, King James translation, as recited by Linus van Pelt in A Charlie Brown Christmas. For half a century, it’s been one of the most significant phrases in American Christianity.
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