One of the crucial beloved vacation specials ever made doesn’t begin with costumed pageants, joyful carols or snowmen come to life however with a self-aware declaration of seasonal despair.
“I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus,” says Charlie Brown, shuffling by means of the snow as different children frolic to a track concerning the vacation’s happiness and cheer. “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”
Sixty years in the past this month, on Dec. 9, 1965, TV audiences have been launched to a downtrodden blockhead and his quest to search out pleasure and perceive the true that means of Christmas — made tougher when he doesn’t get any Christmas playing cards, the opposite youngsters can’t be bothered to take heed to his directions for the Christmas play Lucy appoints him to direct and his personal canine enters a commercialized adorning contest to win “money, money, money.”
Charlie Brown is anxious and depressed throughout the remainder of the yr, so understandably, it will get heavier in the course of the holidays. (“I know nobody likes me. Why do we need a holiday season to emphasize it?” he laments). The identical is true for the remainder of us. The collective grief loads of us really feel, whether or not it’s our nervousness concerning the future or just lacking a world that after felt a bit kinder, is heightened when everybody else desires to slap a pink and inexperienced bow on it.
Vacation gloom is style
We now have extra fashionable examples of vacation gloom — “Home Alone” or “The Holdovers,” “The Family Stone,” “Last Christmas,” Joni Mitchell’s “River” and loads of different reminders that Christmastime might be arduous in essays and antidepressant commercials. However “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is perhaps essentially the most uncomplicated, most honest and most direct. It affords us all of the unadorned language we have to say, “You know what, I feel pretty bad this year, and that’s not the way I’m supposed to feel.”
Even essentially the most holiday-inclined have felt this pang sooner or later. My dad, Joe, who was born in 1968 and grew up with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” simply as all of us did, with annual airings and Vince Guaraldi’s jazz soundtrack taking part in on a loop, put it merely to me as soon as. In 2018, on a drive to fulfill household the evening earlier than Thanksgiving, I put the album on, to which my dad remarked that it at all times gave him a sense, however one he couldn’t identify. My suggestion of “melancholy” didn’t fairly match.
“It always made me think, ‘I’m not going to be a kid much longer,’ even when I was a kid,” he stated, laughing a bit from the driving force’s seat. That I might perceive. I used to be 21 on the time, and my pleasure for the season felt exceptionally distant. Even effectively earlier than then, Charlie Brown’s Christmas disaster had represented my very own advanced emotions of hope, loneliness and nervousness, from childhood till now, and in addition made me extra snug that these emotions can exist collectively.
That feeling my dad described now strikes me as a form of preemptive grief, one we see Charlie Brown feeling in his namesake particular throughout what ought to be a cheerful time of yr, with Snoopy skating and children writing to Santa and Guaraldi’s ubiquitous jazz rating. Charlie Brown is grieving the lack of childhood marvel and his pleasure of the season — doubtless sooner than most of us expertise it, however he is aware of he doesn’t really feel the anticipation and happiness he’s purported to really feel. He’s simply unsure why.
This yr, my grief is each collective and private. On Oct. 15, my dad died all of a sudden however peacefully. It was not anticipated. We have been shut. I miss him consistently. The loss feels summary some days and others, taking a look at photographs or movies looks like touching a scorching range. I veer between absolutely leaning into the vacations, greedy for some sense of normalcy and pleasure, and wishing it will all go away.
Hope amid grief
Watching “A Charlie Brown Christmas” this yr, what stands out for me is that nothing adjustments for Charlie Brown to “solve” his despair. Neither the opposite youngsters nor his canine apologizes to him. Who is aware of if he pulls off directing the Christmas play, for the reason that particular ends after only one disastrous rehearsal. In the end, it’s not any of the season’s industrial trappings, however as a substitute verses from the Gospel of Luke and a small, drooping tree that assist persuade our hero it’s potential to search out hope in the course of the vacation season, regardless of the grief. There’s an even bigger that means than what’s occurring out on this planet and inside Charlie Brown’s personal head.
Nothing goes to alter for me, both. I’ll really feel the lack of my dad as we speak, tomorrow, on Christmas Day and on daily basis after that. However I will probably be OK, even alongside the ache of his absence. Proper now, I’m discovering my hope within the kindness of household, buddies and strangers; the understanding of my husband as he walks alongside me; the enjoyment of speaking about my dad with my sister; the consolation of scorching espresso in a Snoopy mug; the idea in one thing greater and less complicated than my grief.
I gained’t really feel completely happy on a regular basis this vacation season. Perhaps you gained’t both, for one cause or many. However perhaps, on this second, with the hope of one thing else forward, it’s the best way we’re purported to really feel.
Abigail Rosenthal is an editor and author in Austin, Texas. © 2025 The Press Democrat. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
