What now?

I wrote this a few years back (for the L.A. Times), and it’s all still true.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" makes its yearly visit this week, in all its gorgeous melancholy. One of the first and still relatively few holiday perennials created by television, it remains, after nearly 50 years, as fresh as snowfall.

What makes it so? For one thing, it isn't about any cooked-up crisis in the life of a mythological creature; there are no elves, no reindeer, no Santa Claus. It's just about us. In the year he watched his humble comic strip become a national obsession, Charles Schulz wrote a little fable about the commercializing of a pure, deep, simple thing, and the only Christmas magic it allows is the kind we muster ourselves, when we pay attention to something other than ourselves.

As animated by Bill Melendez, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" remains true to both the spirit of Christmas and to the spirit of "Peanuts" — it makes its pitch for hope and love, but it doesn't sell short the anxiety and alienation the season creates. "I know nobody likes me," sighs Charlie Brown. "Why do we have to have a holiday season to emphasize it?"