Christmas is coming

 

Maybe my two favorite Christmas Season television specials are A Christmas Story and A Charlie Brown Christmas. I have to lean back and ask myself Why?, but I think I know. They are old timey, at least Ralphie is, with toys in the main street downtown store's display window like we used to have in stores on Harrison Avenue, and Ralphie as desperately wanting the Daisy BB gun as I did. He got his, and I eventually got mine not as a gift but I saved up for it (unfortunately, my guilt and grief at shooting and killing one little blue jay finished me forever on hunting). And the Oldsmobile, Ralphie's dad's 1937 Olds Six and all the cars that were on the streets, around the neighborhood, parked in driveways when I was growing up. It's about Christmas when I was a boy, I reckon that's Why.

Charlie Brown is different. I first discovered Good Old Charlie Brown when I was in college, I'm thinking a freshman at Florida, maybe I was a senior, the memory is associated with Brad, my KA pledge brother. Brad is who exclaimed, "You never heard of Good Old Charlie Brown?" We were buddies our freshman year, he was from Hialeah, drove a 1939 Mercury convertible, which he compared unfavorably to his first car, a 1936 Ford convertible. 

Not a student, Brad didn't make the fall semester 2.0 GPA required to be initiated as a KA brother, and he flunked out at the end of our freshman year. But we stayed in touch, he returned, again as a freshman, for summer school 1956, as I was starting my senior year. That fall semester 1956 we were roommates, renting an apartment that was a converted garage a block behind the KA house on University Avenue, and flirted with the high school girls who passed our window on their way to school every morning as we were eating breakfast. 

Brad flunked out again at the end of that fall semester, and over the years we lost touch. He was a good guy. He had a crush on my sister, and long after I was gone off in the Navy he used to stop by and see her when he was driving between Miami and Arizona, where he worked in forestry. Brad introduced me to Peanuts and Charlie Brown.

I remember when we had to vacate the little apartment, our landlady cried and told us, "You're the nicest boys I ever had here."

Anyway, the film, which came out in 1965 while we were living in Japan, I've now been watching nearly sixty years, since the Christmas I was thirty years old, 1966. It's charming, enchanting, beguiling, sentimental without being maudlin, leaves me in dreamland, and conveys the meaning of Christmas better than I ever could do in a Christmas Eve sermon as a parish priest:

Christmas is about kindness, lovingkindness, especially toward those who are least attractive or who seem least loveable; which, when you get to my age you may realize, lovingkindness is the only thing that really mattered in human life.

And, by the way, speaking of Advent, that's what the Nativity was meant to tell us.

RSF&PTL

T88&c 

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pic pinched from the New York Times along with this heading by a Jewish writer:

“A Charlie Brown Christmas,” which debuted in 1965, was frank about its Christianity, even for its time. Producers were convinced that putting the Bible on TV would be a disaster. ABC, via Associated Press

“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was a one-of-a-kind wonder when it premiered in 1965 and remains so almost 60 years later. Unlike the other jingle-belled baubles that TV throws down the chimney each year, it is melancholy and meditative. The animation is minimalist and subdued, full of grays and wafting snowflakes. I could wrap myself in the Vince Guaraldi jazz score like a quilt.

And then there’s the speech.

Charlie Brown, having Charlie-Browned his way through a disastrous attempt to direct a school pageant and the adoption of the most anemic specimen on a Christmas-tree lot, despairs over the crass materialism of the holiday and pleads for someone to tell him “what Christmas is all about.”