(courtesy Amazon)
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The special consists of a series of vignettes, each one starring a different member of the Peanuts gang in various Christmas time situations. (courtesy Peanuts wiki)
You have to feel a little sorry for any of the Peanuts’ Christmas specials that followed in the wake of the classic A Charlie Brown Christmas (which turns 60 this year!).
No matter how whimsically good or heartfelt they are, they will always stand in the shadow of what is arguably one of the greatest, most affecting and meaningfully quirky Christmas specials of all time.
Which is a pity really because spending time with any of the Peanuts characters, gifted with such grounded authenticity, likability and thoughtfulness by Charles M. Schulz, is something to be cherished and it’s just as true in Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales.
Released in 2002, Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales is the last of the Peanuts animated specials to be credited to Schulz who died just two years previously, screening every year thereafter until 2019, rather fittingly, as a companion piece to A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Operating as a series of somewhat interconnected vignettes, Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales is almost like a character study, giving us insight into how some of the major characters in the comic strip approach Christmas and what about the season particularly matters to them.
We get to see their positive and negative attributes, and while the special is meant to amuse and delight, and it most assuredly does, what these small looks at each character do is also shed some typically Peanuts-ian thinking about what Christmas should or does mean as a season.
So it is that we get to see that Snoopy, rather unsurprisingly, approaches Christmas with a mix of quirky and sincerity, dressing up as Santa Claus to rise money by bell ringing on the street but failing to actually play Christmas music while he does so (he opts, rather delightfully and inexplicably, for “Oh! Susanna” which Lucy, naturally enough, castigates him for. That he switches to “Christmastime is here” from A Charlie Brown Christmas is fitting and nostalgic, and that he also helps sally decorate a tree later on without complaint points to how this whimsical character, for all his trademark hilarious narcissism, is also rather sweet like any dog would be.
We also rather wonderfully treated to an earnest Linus trying to get the tone of his letter to Santa right – Lucy, by way of comedic comparison, has no such qualms and doesn’t overthink things in her vignette, concentrating on the types of presents Linus and poor Schroeder should get her – and to get a card to a weirdly idiosyncratic girl at school who constantly changes her name and who slips him a false address so that his sincerely sent Christmas card to her gets returned.
Sally is perhaps the most amusing, thinking that she should write a letter to “Samantha Claus”, that everyone will love homemade paper planes for Christmas and that she needs to “fall down” a Christmas tree rather than “cut one down”. She’s always adamantly wrong but goodhearted even so and that emerges beautifully in her interactions with a neighbourhood boy who, in the end, lets her keep a pine tree that fell down in his yard for her Christmas tree.
And, of course, what kind one Peanuts special would be complete without Charlie Brown, whose vignette is small but whimsical funny moments with Linus and Sally where he gets to actually be the one who holds it all together which is lovely because he’s far more capable than anyone ever acknowledges in the comic strip.
Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales may not be one of the greats but it’s a quiet and beautiful joy to watch and a worthy addition to the Peanuts’ library of Christmas specials.
Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tales streams on AppleTV.