The Christmas Classic That Almost Wasn't

From USAToday (via Yahoo News):

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

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[Executive producer Lee] Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.

"We told Schulz, 'Look, you can't read from the Bible on network television,' " Mendelson says. "When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, 'We've ruined Charlie Brown.' "

Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation's viewers. "When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked," says Melendez, 89. "They actually liked it!"

And when the program airs today at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, it will mark its 40th anniversary - a run that has made it a staple of family holiday traditions and an icon of American pop culture. The show won an Emmy and a Peabody award and began a string of more than two dozen Peanuts specials.

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Parents say the combination of humor and bedrock values is what draws them and their children to the show. "It does provide a balance, but it's a balance that we as a society have forgotten about," says Patrick Lemp, 43, of West Hartford, Conn. He'll watch tonight with son Brendan, 13.

"This is one of the last shows that actually comes out and talks about the meaning of Christmas. As a society, we're taking religion out of a lot of the trappings of the holiday. This one is different."

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For many viewers, it is the speech by Linus from Luke near the end that packs the biggest emotional wallop.

Christopher Shea was just 7 when he did the part and credits Melendez's coaching and his mom's doctorate in 17th-century British literature for Linus' lilting eloquence with a Biblical text.

Shea, who now lives in Eureka, Calif., with two daughters, 11 and 16, answers quickly when asked why the special has proved so enduring. "It's the words," he says.

Shea says that for years, in his teens and 20s, he didn't quite understand his soliloquy's impact.

"People kept coming up to me and saying, 'Every time I watch that, I cry,' " he says. "But as I got older, I understood the words more, and I understood the power of what was going on. Now I cry, too."

My Comments:
I'm not surprised that there was some opposition to such an overtly Christian message being put on television, but at least "A Charlie Brown Christmas" did end up making it onto the airwaves.

By contrast, these days you can drop hundreds of bucks in a retail store buying Christmas gifts, and the retailers won't even acknowledge the reason you're enriching them by wishing you a "Merry Christmas".

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" captures for all time some of what has been lost in this age of "multicultural" oversensitivity (oversensitive, that is, regarding all things NOT Christian). My family adores this program, and we own the DVD. Not only will we watch it on TV tonight, we will watch it over and over again throughout the coming month.

Thank you Charles M. Schulz for boldly reminding us "what Christmas is all about".