Charlie Brown's Televised Christmas

December 27, 2007

You have to look pretty carefully on the back of A Charlie Brown Christmas to discover that it was first shown in 1965. It is boxed along with the Peanuts Halloween and Thanksgiving specials.. and labeled "Peanuts Classic".. giving it a certain out-of-time feel. And that is the point of selling these DVDs: they are not presented as historical exercises, but classics that every child will love for all time.

I have strong memories of certain Christmas specials. They were on television every year: Frosty the Snowman, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.. I could go on. All these shows.. including the Peanuts specials.. were geared for television viewing. They fit snugly into a half hour slot. They filled a niche for television programming.. and in turn came to define Christmas for my generation.

The curious thing about our present cultural moment is that even in the midst of transformation in terms of medium, the television-developed canon of holiday programming continues. Instead of seeing these programs on television, many children now experience them through DVDs. Often changes in technology lead to a high level of changeover.. forcing the development of a new crop of works to fill the new niche. But we seem poised to more or less accept the television canon as a part of our heritage.

We should imagine what it might have been like to see a program like A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. That was over 40 years ago! Were these people in the mid '60s also consuming works made in 1925? That would include radio programs and silent films and 78 records. There was tremendous technological change between 1925 and 1965 and those works from 40 years earlier could not fit in to the television canon. Who would watch a silent film on television?

But the forty years between 1965 and 2005 are remarkably united. You could draw a straight line between that world and ours now—in terms of televised holiday specials, movies, and popular music. The level of technological change is surely as great or greater than that of the earlier period.. so why the continuity?? Right there is a question that I want to answer.