The Sound of a <em>Charlie Brown</em> Christmas

Last week, I wept a little when listening to Christmas music. Very few works of culture make me shed actual tears. Over dinner after a screening of the new film Hamnet , my friend Nancy told me she was surprised that the movie, which concerns the agonizing death of William Shakespeare’s only son, didn’t make me cry. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said. Then I went home, opened Spotify on my phone, and hit “Play” on the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas . I fell asleep to the record with wet eyes. This always happens to me with A Charlie Brown Christmas , which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year. Getting verklempt, that is. Perhaps it’s nostalgia for Christmases past (it was my difficult mother’s favorite holiday) or a longing for a Christmas that never was (like I said, it was my difficult mother’s favorite holiday). Mostly, I think, it’s the mood the album evokes, one that feels familiar but foreign; cold but cozy; festive but reflective; spiritual but secular. The soft piano strokes and wire brushes of “Christmas Time Is Here” convey a lament and a welcoming: sorrow, perhaps, for the difficulty of the season, and the offer of a soft place to land. The descending, twinkling notes of “Skating” impart an aura of quiet wonder. The percussive energy of “Christmas Is Coming” is convivial and anticipatory. The cover of “What Child Is This” isn’t bad either. This might all sound a bit sentimental, but I’d wager I’m not the only person whose experience of the holidays was profoundly shaped by the 1965 Christmas album (and the special, of course). I grew up near Sacramento, California, where it doesn’t snow, but our family had a few rituals that helped define the unfolding of the season: buying a fir tree, placing our stockings above the fireplace, and gathering around the television to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas , which transported us to a flat, wintry world where snowflakes fall on kids skating around frozen ponds who will later spiritedly debate the meaning of the holiday. (United Features Syndicate / Everett Collection) Things have changed. I no longer live at home, my school years are long behind me, and the collapse of linear television has made communal viewing, of the sort that we did with A Charlie Brown Christmas , largely a thing of the past. When the special first aired, it got a 45 share in the Nielsen ratings, meaning that nearly half— half! —of the households watching TV at that moment in the United States were watching it. As Caitlin Flanagan wrote in The Atlantic , “In those days you had three networks, and if one of them was broadcasting a show for children at night, you can bet that the news had been shouted down school stairwells and across playgrounds, and you can bet that all of us were in position, sitting on family-room carpets and living-room couches, breathing as one, soaking it...

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