Charlie Brown's pathetic little Christmas shrub became a visual icon for the push and pull between capitalism and the reason for the season. Courtesy of ABC / United Features Syndicate.

One year later Charles Schulz, Lee Mendelson and the Coca-Cola Company teamed up to bring America, A Charlie Brown Christmas. This special began as a documentary about Peanuts creator Schulz but did a quick revision when the sponsor, Coca-Cola, began casting about for a Christmas special. The special was produced under tremendous pressure; Schulz wrote the script outline over a weekend, and the entire show was animated in six months. The results were stunning. On December 9, 1965, Bill Melendez’ faithful animated renderings, Vince Guaraldi’s snappy jazz score, and a scrawny Christmas shrub became an indelible part of Christmas. A Charlie Brown Christmas was a triumph of personality animation, one that enshrined the Peanuts gang as cultural icons while gently questioning that same culture’s values. Not long after that, old Army buddies Chuck Jones and Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel hooked up for the first time since working on “Private Snafu” cartoons back in the 1940s. Jones adapted Geisel’s story How the Grinch Stole Christmas for a TV special. On December 18, 1966, How The Grinch Stole Christmas stole a nation’s heart as well. Geisel contributed a marvelous story; Jones redefined it using his impeccable skills in character design, timing and expressivity. When two professionals of such caliber collude and then sign up Boris Karloff as narrator, the result can only be a legendary animated Christmas special — which Grinch undoubtedly was.

The triumvirate of Chuck Jones, Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel and Boris Karloff made How The Grinch Stole Christmas a legendary Christmas special. © 2002 Warner Home Video. All Rights Reserved.

Following these four charming entries, animated Christmas specials descended on the networks like a blizzard straight out of the North Pole. Some of them were forgettable folderol featuring such lightweights as the Mirthworms while other specials, particularly those produced by Rankin/Bass, became synonymous with the season. Established characters such as Fred Flintstone, Yogi Bear and Garfield took their turn beneath the mistletoe, while the raucous ragamuffins of South Park actually originated as an animated “Christmas card.” Even Ren and Stimpy managed to clock in with a Yuletide tale. Perhaps no special was as freakish as Filmation’s 1985 offering starring He-Man and She-Ra (who would seem to be more comfortable worshipping Serapis than the man from Galilee). The Christmas specials eventually splintered into two genres, some with a religious message and some with more secular intent. The former camp generally dealt with the birth of Jesus and the events thereof, as in Rankin/Bass’ The Little Drummer Boy. The latter sort of special was more variegated and dealt with Christmas legends, the solving of a crisis that would “save” Christmas (often due to the incapacitation of Santa Claus), or a quest to discover the “true” meaning of Christmas. This camp holds by far the bulk of the Christmas specials and reflects the confusion that American society has long held in regard to the holiday.

An Uneasy Relationship
In his excellent discourse on American holidays, Consumer Rites, sociologist Leigh Eric Schmidt notes that: “The American marketplace has served for more than a century and a half as a site of competition about the meanings of Christmas. The contest has revealed deep ambiguities in the culture — fundamental tensions between asceticism and indulgence, simplicity and affluence, piety and spectacle, religion and consumerism, Christ and culture...a site of not a little ambivalence, paradox, and contradiction.” As always, animation is inseparable from the culture that produces it. The best synthesis of the two camps is probably the Charlie Brown special, but then, Charles Schulz had been slipping morsels of piety into his comic strip all along and was probably best suited to pull this complicated stunt off. In many of our animated Christmas specials the origin of Santa or the celebration of a peripheral holiday character (such as Frosty the Snowman) vies with the story of the Nativity told in others. At times the “true” meaning of Christmas seems to be unconnected to the birth of Christ and is defined more as a spirit of unselfishness or altruism above and beyond the call of duty. The Grinch cartoon, for example, seems to define the “true” meaning of Christmas as indefatigable cheer in the face of Yuletide deprivation. Or is it more a measure of the “true” meaning of Christmas to observe what sorts of commercial pitches are played during breaks in these Yuletide antics, sacred and secular alike?