December 9, 1965: 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' Premieres
On December 9, 1965, a low-budget cartoon about a sad kid and a scrawny tree became a Christmas institution.
The network was sure it would flop. Instead, nearly half of America watched.
On December 9, 1965, CBS aired a 25-minute cartoon that its own executives were certain would fail. A Charlie Brown Christmas -- the first television special based on Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip -- had been thrown together in six months for somewhere between $76,000 and $96,000, sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company. Real children voiced the characters. There was no laugh track, which was nearly unheard of. The music was a spare jazz score by pianist Vince Guaraldi. A week before air, the preview left CBS brass glum.
Schulz wrote the script in a matter of weeks, and Melendez -- who also voiced Snoopy -- directed it. The production broke nearly every rule of children's television: kids who sounded like kids, a jazz score instead of syrupy strings, long silences, and a direct quotation from the Bible. It shouldn't have worked. Instead it became the template: more than forty Peanuts specials followed, but none ever matched the first.
Then it aired -- and nearly half of American households tuned in.
The story is simple, which is why it endures. Charlie Brown is depressed amid the tinsel and the shopping frenzy, unable to feel what everyone insists he should feel. Talked into directing the neighborhood Christmas play by Lucy, he picks the saddest little tree on the lot -- and gets mocked for it. Then Linus steps into a spotlight and, in the special's most famous scene, recites the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke -- a passage Schulz insisted on keeping, network qualms and all. The kids come around, the scrawny tree gets decorated, and Charlie Brown learns what the season is actually about.
The special didn't just succeed; it rearranged the culture. The aluminum Christmas tree -- the sleek, space-age fad of the early sixties -- never recovered; the little real tree Charlie Brown loved is often credited with killing it. The special has aired every holiday season since, and its soundtrack became a beloved jazz classic. "The continued success of the special has surprised me as much as anyone," Schulz told TV Guide in 1985. "A lot of the drawings are terrible."
Terrible drawings or not, no Christmas feels complete without them more than half a century on. A Charlie Brown Christmas proved that sincerity beats polish, that children can carry a story, and that a cartoon about a sad little tree could say more about the holiday than all the tinsel in the department stores.
Photo: Roger Higgins, World Telegram staff photographer, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
