“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was a one-of-a-kind wonder when it premiered in 1965 and remains so almost 60 years later. Unlike the other jingle-belled baubles that TV throws down the chimney each year, it is melancholy and meditative. The animation is minimalist and subdued, full of grays and wafting snowflakes. I could wrap myself in the Vince Guaraldi jazz score like a quilt.
And then there’s the speech.
Charlie Brown, having Charlie-Browned his way through a disastrous attempt to direct a school pageant and the adoption of the most anemic specimen on a Christmas-tree lot, despairs over the crass materialism of the holiday and pleads for someone to tell him “what Christmas is all about.”
His friend Linus volunteers: He stands on a spotlighted stage and, as the soundtrack goes dead silent, recites a passage from the Gospel of Luke in which a band of angels proclaim the coming of Christ the Lord.
I have known people for whom the speech is a deal breaker. It’s too much Christianity for them, too directly preached. (This is not a “those were different times” thing, either; in 1965, Charles Schulz’s producers were convinced that putting the Bible on TV would be a disaster.) Some objectors are nonbelievers, some are Christian but not devout, some are, like me, Jewish.
I can understand. I do not personally believe that the physical embodiment of God was born in a Bethlehem stable, announced by a choir of the heavenly host, any more than I believe in Santa Claus.
Yet this year, just in time for Hanukkah, I went to Apple TV+ and fired up “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which is one of my favorite programs ever made — in part precisely because of how frank it is about being Christian. And in part because it’s more Jewish in spirit than you may think.
A little bit about me: My mother was a Jewish immigrant from Morocco. My father was an American Catholic — not very religious, but he took me to church with him. (It was important to my mother, I think, that her children fit in within our very Christian, not-un-Peanuts-like Midwestern town.) At Christmas, we had a tree and a terrifying bobblehead Santa figurine.
All this is to say, as a child, I knew I had a different background from my neighbors. But I didn’t feel excluded from Christmas, or — as a fanatical reader of Schulz’s Peanuts collections — from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
As I got older, things got more complicated. I stopped going to church and stopped believing. I identified ethnically and culturally as Jewish, more so once I moved to New York, the finest place on Earth to be a nonpracticing secular Jew, and married into a Jewish family. I don’t go to temple, but I fry a mean Hanukkah doughnut.
But I never gave up “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” my identification with which is core to my identity in the way that religion is to believers.
This may partly be a matter of looking past the Christianity of it all and appreciating the art. And the art is magnificent; for all of the Snoopy high jinks and slapstick, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is as close to poetry as TV gets. If Irving Berlin and other great Jewish musicians could compose America’s favorite Christmas songs, surely I can yada-yada past a few New Testament verses.
But honestly, I appreciate the Peanuts special more for how it looks directly at the Christianity of it all. It’s not trying to hide the ball. It is sincere and radically earnest, without any interest in converting anyone. This is just, brass tacks, what Christmas is, a ubiquitous celebration based in a faith that I don’t share but that I can appreciate the way I can appreciate the art of plenty of other cultures.
There’s more to it, though. At the risk of sacrilege, the older I get, the more I wonder if the tiny Midwestern Protestant characters of Peanuts actually read to me a little bit … Jewish?
I’m not just talking about the comic’s midcentury affinity for psychiatric analysis. For instance, notwithstanding his Gospel quotes, Linus, my favorite character, has many attributes of the Brainy Jewish Friend archetype, like Seth Cohen of “The O.C.” or Ross Geller of “Friends.”
He analyzes and overanalyzes, talking Charlie Brown through his depressions and existential confusion. He nurses his anxieties and neuroses, carrying his security blanket like an emblem of strength (capable of whipping a snowball like David’s slingshot). Every Halloween, he forgoes the celebration of the larger community around him and awaits a messiah.
If not a Jewish surrogate, Linus at least carries himself like your brainy, philosemitic Christian friend who knows the scriptures better than you do. This is the same kid who, in a 1970 comic, wished a department store Santa Happy Hanukkah and discussed Judas Maccabaeus with him.
And in theme and spirit, the Peanuts special is no raucous Christmas party. It’s a story about ambivalence (that great Jewish value). It’s also about something that many Jewish kids can relate to: alienation from the very Yuletide holiday that the special celebrates.
Charlie Brown is unable to get into the Christmas spirit. His mailbox, empty of cards, is a reminder that he doesn’t belong. He’s surrounded by a garish commercial spectacle that leaves him empty and depressed. Everything, down to the pink aluminum tree his friends urge him to buy, feels cold and fake.
He resolves his problem eventually, not by assimilating into the celebration around him, but by going his own way, finding, and nearly killing, the world’s sickliest-looking Christmas tree in his determination to celebrate his own values. Only then do his friends come to him and see the beauty in his miserable twig and his evergreen stubbornness.
The show ends on a note of community. But it also says that it’s OK to be separate, it’s OK to question, it’s OK to skip the party and wrestle with the big questions of meaning on your own terms. It, like the Peanuts strip itself, is comfortable with uncertainty, with asking questions that don’t have answers. These themes are not exclusively Jewish. But they’re not not Jewish.
If I’m crazy in seeing Peanuts this way, at least I’m not alone. Abraham J. Twerski, an Orthodox rabbi and psychiatrist, befriended Schulz late in the cartoonist’s life and wrote a series of books that used his comics to explore questions of self-esteem and dealing with tragedy. Robert Smigel, the creator of the “TV Funhouse” segments on “Saturday Night Live,” reportedly once called “A Charlie Brown Christmas” the greatest half-hour of American TV ever made, adding, “and you know I’m serious when I say that, because I’m Jewish.”
Not every Jew — or atheist, or Muslim, or otherwise — will agree. Like Linus, I can speak only for myself: I feel more comfortable with Peanuts’ pint-size theologians than in the nonsectarian company of Rudolph and Heat Miser. Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown. And l’chaim.