Victor sent this along yesterday, and I wanted to share it. It's a Yahoo! news article about the enduring appeal of A Charlie Brown Christmas. I've seen this show every Christmas for as long as I can remember, and it still gets me a little choked up every time. Money quote:
Schulz, who died in 2000, never doubted the power of his tale of Charlie Brown's quest for the true meaning of Christmas amid the garish trappings of a commercialized holiday. "It comes across in the voice of a child," says Jeannie Schulz, the wife of the cartoonist, whose friends called him Sparky. "Sparky used to say there will always be a market for innocence."
Now that my nephew is around, we've started sharing it with him, and I love sitting and watching him watch it, wide-eyed, taking it all in. Last Christmas he was only 2, so I'm sure he didn't get much, but you gotta start em young. It makes me sad that they just don't seem to make this kind of stuff anymore. Everything now has to be so hip and reflective of pop culture, and have sexual innuendos and hip hop music. It breaks my heart. Another quote:
"A key element in all of Schulz's work is his sense of man's place in the scheme of things in a theological sense as well as a psychological sense," says Thomas Inge, an English and humanities professor at Randolph-Macon College who edited a series of interviews with Schulz released in 2000. "Then there's this slightly cynical attitude that makes everything work."
Maybe a trip home and to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas is just what I need to get back in the spirit this year.
4 comments:
i, too, have seen a charlie brown christmas every year. my brother and i also loved, emmitt otter's jug band christmas as children.
oh, yes, Emmitt Otter. My mom loves that too, and always gets really excited about our watching it at Christmas. In some ways, I actually have a lot more memories associated with that, but all in all, I think A Charlie Brown Christmas is a superior piece of work. Those otters sure are cute, though.
A Charlie Brown Christmas always makes me cry.
Money quotes:
Charlie Brown hangs an ornament on the tree; it bends over
Charlie Brown: I killed it. Everything I touch gets ruined.
and later...
Linus Van Pelt: I didn't know it was such a bad little tree. It's not bad at all, really. Maybe all it needs is a little love.
*sniff*
Maybe that's what we all need.
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