A Charlie Brown Christmas

I originally intended to write an upbeat happy blog about the cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas. Discussing some of my fond memories of growing-up in Pennsylvania. Sledding on the hillsides, ice skating on the little pond in the cornfield, cutting down Christmas trees, and enjoying the Holiday with my cousins. Then I realized that A Charlie Brown Christmas was released in 1965.

I was four years old. We were in a red Dodge station wagon traveling from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. My cousins weren’t born yet, and my Dad had received orders to go to Vietnam. Wow, 1965 was not such a good year. Here are a few more things from 1965.

A brief look on the web of 1965 produced the following results. A gallon of gas cost 31 cents and had lead. If we had bought the Dodge new it would have been about $2,600. Malcolm X had been assassinated. Two good things from 1965 – Washington enacted the Voting Right Act of 1965 and the Grateful Dead played their first concert in San Francisco.

Charles M. Schulz and Bill Melendez found themselves immersed in a society going through monumental changes when they did A Charlie Brown Christmas. They chose to point out the rampant commercialization of Christmas – a topic still pertinent today. I have to wonder if they had talked about civil rights and Viet Nam would people still be watching the cartoon over forty years later. Did they grasp the deeper significance of greed in our society and the problems deriving from it?

Or maybe I am just reading too much into a children’s cartoon. After all it is the Holiday season. Maybe I should add some rum to the eggnog, sit back and enjoy the show.