Featured Essay: A Charlie Brown Christmas

by Tara McCook

And there were in the same country shepherds

Abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night…

In 1986, the flea market in Mobile, Alabama was way on the western edge of town, in an area that is now full to the brim with that particular kind of small-city exurban sprawl - strip malls and subdivisions with the garage on the front of every home. But back then it was empty and rural, the perfect place for a junk market to seem like an exciting adventure to a five year old.

My dad took me out there a lot to go “exploring.” We’d dig through the stalls - there was a man who let you pan for “treasures” by sticking a sifter in a pile of wet sand that had bits of barely polished glass in it, and I loved my “gemstones” that he carefully retrieved and stuck into a little glass pill bottle for me. 

But there were also records, and that’s what my dad was into. He’d go looking for classic country and bluegrass so he could learn the hypertraditional songs the audiences wanted to hear at the bluegrass festivals his band played all over the Gulf Coast. There was a lot of what sounded like the same six nasally old gospel tracks. He didn’t really like that music, but it’s the band he could join when we left New Jersey for Alabama for him to find work. He is a guitarist, a dedicated student of the instrument with an incredible ear for improvisation and a fanatical dedication to his art. But he is also unfailingly practical, and if the market for paying musicians required learning and singing “Are You Washed In the Blood?” in a fake Southern accent, well, that’s what he would do.

On these trips, he would always get me to “help” him look for new records. By the time I was five, I was good at weeding out scratched records, remembering which ones he’d bought and which ones were new, and vetoing the ones where the men sounded too mean and severe. And every time, he would ask me, “baby, do you see one for you?” The answer was always no. Until one day it wasn’t.

Generations of kids grew up loving Charlie Brown and I am no exception. Family lore states that Peanuts cartoons are some of the first things I could read alone, and I waited every day for the paper to get the comics section to read the next one. So when I saw A Charlie Brown Christmas peeking back at me from a crate of well-loved vinyl in that flea market stall, I grabbed it and ran to Daddy before someone else could take it. Daddy gave me the $1 bill to give to the man and my prize was all mine. 

The record was a 1977 pressing of the audio of the original 1965 TV special. It came with an insert that printed the dialogue of the show like a script, with images from the show. The used copy from the flea market was already written on and colored on with crayons, which I added to over the years. But it was also my introduction to the special. From that moment on, we watched it every single year. I played that vinyl record until it got too scratched and well loved to go on. 

There are so many essays about A Charlie Brown Christmas, the unlikeliest of classics. There are textbooks analyzing its theology, oral histories of its making and how somehow, the network stooges weren’t allowed to ruin it. Charles Schulz had a viewpoint and he expressed it beautifully and fully, in a 22-minute capsule analysis of love and greed and cruelty and family, all wrapped in sophisticated midcentury jazz that lent a depth and precision to a story of and for children.

I spent so much time with that record, reading along with the dialogue until I could recite it from memory. And without realizing it, Schulz’s message was seeding itself in my mind and in my heart. You don’t have to follow the theology of Christianity to understand the moral of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I was obviously a child in Reagan’s American South, but even I could see what TV was showing me on Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and all that brass-plated new money. Everything I could see was overstuffed. Big hair, loud cars, big fake jewelry, the whole shebang. A calm, quiet, meditative recitation of the Gospel of Luke by a kid my size, still holding a blanket, resonated in my heart in a way I would not have words to describe for a long time to come.

The booklet came apart years ago, the record itself used completely up. But that precious treasure, found in a box in the country nearly a half-century ago, is the keystone of everything I grew up to value. My mother, who passed away in 2008 after a long hard life of mental illness, was a devout Presbyterian with a liberation theology twist. Every year she was able, she and I would curl up with hot cocoa to watch. We’d recite the gospel together, complete with the “lights, please?” Linus adds at the beginning. 

And there were in the same country shepherds, abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night, when lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them. And they were sore afraid, but the angel said unto them “Fear not, for behold I bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And he shall be a sign unto you. Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in the manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on Earth peace, good will toward men.”

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

When Linus finishes his recitation, Vince Guaraldi’s “O Christmas Tree” plays uninterrupted for close to a minute. Charlie Brown is walking home with his busted little wooden tree, an unwanted natural relic amongst a chorus clamoring for crass metallic commercialism. And the power of that moment, small and still, rearranges my cells every time I think about it. It’s an indelible message delivered by a very little boy that packs an incredible punch. In times of happiness and times of horror, I come back to that feeling. And it all started with a used record in a battered box in the middle of nowhere in Alabama. Vinyl changes lives - that’s a story everyone here knows well, it’s what brought us to this community to share how it changed us. But sometimes it’s those first little steps, a kid’s record of a kid’s story, that build the strongest foundations. 

Tara is a lawyer who lives in Mobile, Alabama with her husband and an ever-increasing pile of records on the sun room floor. She has too many Legos and not enough time to build them.