By A Charlie Brown Christmas is the quintessential Christmas movie. This animated short has inspired so many jokes, stories, and memories, it just wouldn’t be Christmas without that blockhead Charlie Brown. You’d be hard pressed to find a film more peaceful and reflective of the holiday. There are no flashy gimmicks, no crazy characters, and no strict commercialism.
A Charlie Brown Christmas celebrates the holiday’s true meaning. Even if it shoves the birth of Jesus Christ in your socket, it’s hard not to love a short that’s just about an awkward and lonely kid who’s down on his luck. Regardless in how confident you thought you were when you were younger, we were all once like Charlie Brown.
[Nick’s Flixmas is a 25 day celebration of films Nick watches every Christmas! Nick will do some analysis, review, and just generally walk down memory lane. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the ride. Merry Flixmas!]
The Peanuts cartoons get replayed every major holiday for a reason. There’s nothing cynical, nothing reaching, and they’re just plain fun. They’re specials imbued with positivity that comes from a gentle heart. Plus it helps that Charlie Brown is just so adorable. What helps gets most of these deeper messages across are the character’s faces. Next to maybe The Grinch’s weird smile thing he did, the Peanuts gang have my favorite animated faces in any Christmas movie. You can tell me Charlie Brown is a little awkward kid all day, but Charles Schultz just nailed the dopey loner look. Just look at the images I used for this post/ Those little eye wrinkles Charlie Brown always gets make me laugh every single time. I’ve never seen a child show so much adult anguish. He already acts like a sixty year old man.
As for my family, my mother’s really the only one who’ll watch Charlie Brown with me. She introduced me to the cartoons, and she’ll watch them over with me each year. If I’m not at home, she’ll call me and tell me to watch it on TV. It’s pretty great. She’s watching it with me now, too. My dad never took a shine to them, unfortunately. He always says something racist along the lines of “I don’t need to watch those little white boys.” And awful as that may be, I’m awful also since it seems to make me laugh every year he says it. It’s a little tradition around here.
And growing up, my family had our own “Charlie Brown tree.” It was a tabletop fiberoptic tree we got from Walgreens and it was great. We couldn’t afford a big fake tree, or wanted to deal with the mess of a real one, so it was the perfect fit for us. Besides, it made our few presents look absolutely gigantic. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s Christmas Day so I’m going to go eat some kickass ham right about now.
That’s it for Nick’s Flixmas 2013. If you’ve stuck around through this whole thing, I love you. If you’ve read one or two, I love you. If you’ve completely ignored these, I love you. If you’ve watched a Christmas movie because of this feature, I love you.
If you love me, I love you.
Happy Flixmas to all, and to all a good Nick! Have a good and safe holiday!