Bridges history column: Charles Schulz's 'Peanuts' holiday special became instant classic

Charles M. Schulz created a comic strip that captured the hearts of millions in the nearly 50 years that Peanuts ran in thousands of newspapers around the world.  Schulz, an amiable and soft-spoken Minnesota native and World War II veteran, had been drawing the daily strip since 1950.  Fifteen years later, he would be responsible for a Christmas story that has since become a cultural icon.  But it was almost entirely by accident.

In April 1965, executives at the Coca-Cola Company contacted their advertising agency, McCann-Erickson in New York, and asked if there were any Christmas specials they could sponsor that winter, still months away.  The ad agency immediately suggested an adaptation of Schulz’s Peanuts strip even though none had even been proposed and Schulz had not even thought of the idea.

Within days, Schulz, along with producer Lee Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez, produced a story outline. Executives at CBS agreed to air the special but only gave it a budget of $76,000 (or $716,000 in 2022 dollars).

In spite of the special’s purpose of advertising Coca-Cola, Schulz chose a storyline that was critical of crass profiteering and emphasizing the simple message of the Christmas spirit.  By the early 1960s, many cultural commentators had already criticized the commercialization of Christmas and the emphasis on gifts and holiday spending.  In 2021, Americans spent hundreds of billions on Christmas by one estimate, so much that many businesses depend on brisk Christmas shopping to stay afloat.

In the storyline that emerged, inspired by strips that Schulz had run, the main character Charlie Brown was feeling disconnected and depressed as Christmas approached as everyone around him made demands on receiving extravagant gifts, including his sister Sally asking Santa Claus in a letter to make it simple by just sending “tens and twenties.”

As part of directing a Christmas play, Charlie Brown and his friend Linus, a blanket-toting theologian, attempt to buy a Christmas tree.  The two find a lot filled with the aluminum Christmas trees that had become popular by the early 1960s.  Thinking the aluminum trees were too superficial, Charlie Brown chose the one live tree available, a small, dilapidated sapling.  Mocked by his friends about his choice of tree later, he asked what the meaning of Christmas was, prompting Linus to quote Luke 2: 8-14 from the Bible on the birth of Christ.  “And that’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown,” Linus said to Charlie Brown, satisfied and inspired by the answer.

The network, studio executives, and advertisers were reluctant to include the monologue.  The biggest question they had was whether it was in good taste to take a scriptural message so special to millions of Americans and turn it into a cartoon.  Television had only been widely available for a little over a decade by the 1960s.  Television animation had been around for almost as long but critics did not see it as very sophisticated.  Schulz, however, insisted that the scene be included.  In the process, it became the first time the Bible was quoted in a television cartoon.

Animators worked feverishly to produce the thousands of images needed for a cartoon before the deadline.  With 12 images needed each second for a 25-minute special, their work was cut out for them as each needed to be drawn and colored by hand.  Children auditioned to voice the characters with 8-year-old Peter Robbins cast as Charlie Brown and Christopher Shea as Linus, who would both repeat their roles in future specials.  CBS executives were uncertain how audiences would react to the cartoon, trying without success to convince Schulz, Mendelson, and Melendez to make changes to the production, already over budget.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" aired on Dec. 9, 1965.  More than 15.5 million households watched.  It immediately became a classic.  Its heartwarming message that Christmas was more than about shopping became a comfortable reminder for millions.  The special won an Emmy Award in 1966.  It had such a profound impact on American culture that aluminum Christmas trees ceased to be made by 1968.  In the following years, the special was translated into numerous other languages and broadcast in countries around the world.  CBS agreed to produce more Peanuts cartoons, averaging about one per year into the 1990s.  And a slew of other Christmas specials, inspired by the Peanuts success, would follow in the years afterward.

With the popularity of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," CBS would air the special each December until 2000 when it was picked up by ABC for a few years afterward.  Now, it is broadcast on digital streaming networks.  Nearly 60 years after its first airing, it is still a program enjoyed by millions of children and also parents and grandparents who grew up watching it.  Its simple message criticizing the commercialization of the holiday and emphasizing the true meaning of Christmas still resonates in the twenty-first century as countless people continue to look to Christmas as a time of family and togetherness and a time of the special promise of a manger in Bethlehem.

Ken Bridges is a writer, historian and native Texan. He holds a doctorate from the University of North Texas. Bridges can be reached by email at drkenbridges@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Bridges history column: Schulz created comics, holiday TV classic