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Are there really any holdouts?\u00a0 Surely all of us\u2014at least all of us above and below certain ages, and from a certain kind of America and possessed of a laptop or television or grammar-school-aged child\u2014have a soft spot for Charlie Brown.\u00a0 Maybe we are of the \u201cWe Love You Charlie Brown!\u201d tribe,[1]<\/sup><\/a> or maybe some slightly less exuberant cohort, but especially in December, we feel that tug of attachment.\u00a0 On the face of it, our fond feelings for Charlie Brown smack of a kind of cultural conservatism, that yearning for the America-that-never-was that washes across this great land as reliably as faux snow returns to the streets of Tampa year after year.[2]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Still, when you think about what the little bald kid and his spindly tree and his Scripture-spouting friend might actually stand for, you might just stop right in the middle of Target\u2019s giant television department and scratch your head at the evidently subversive quality of the narrative of A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em>.<\/p>\n But you\u2019d be wrong.\u00a0 The really subversive quality of A Charlie Brown Christmas <\/em>is that it invites you to consume an anti-materialistic vision of true Christmas, all the while standing\u00a0 at the pinnacle of a quintessentially capitalist brand.<\/p>\n Think about it.<\/p>\n \u201cChristmas,\u201d a made for television special bankrolled by Coca Cola, elevates an explicitly anti-materialistic, anti-capitalistic (anti)hero in Charlie Brown who rides his rebellion against commercialism not only to (fleeting) social acceptance[3]<\/sup><\/a> but also spiritual illumination.\u00a0 Charlie\u2019s evident virtue, the rightness of his beliefs and actions, is thrown into relief by the evidently avaricious character of his companions and the warped and garish Christmas celebrations that surround him. Even as a child, you notice that Charlie\u2019s sister Sally has crossed some kind of boundary when her Christmas wish list veers into a demand for hard currency: \u201cMake it easy on yourself [Santa]: just send money.\u201d\u00a0 And we scoff at Charlie and his friends\u2019 obsession with Christmas cards, and wince at the Christmas tree lot filled with pink and red aluminum trees and equipped with waving spotlights.\u00a0 Charlie, on the other hand, intuits the emptiness of the Christmas practices that surround him and rebels, first by associating himself with a play about the biblical story of Christmas and then with a grand gesture of empathy and generosity.<\/p>\n Charlie\u2019s journey in A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> shares attributes with other Peanuts staples; Charlie is the underdog, yearning for peer acceptance and fraught with anxieties.\u00a0 He is, as Umberto Eco describes him, a character whose alienation has become an abyss, yet one whose sensitivities are \u201cShakespearean:\u201d Charlie Brown may not know what he knows, but he knows what he feels. At the beginning of the special, while the rest of the gang are headed toward a pond for skating, he pauses with Linus at the wall, a primary locale for soul-searching dialogues throughout the Peanuts genre[4]<\/sup><\/a> and wonders if it\u2019s his fault that he is alienated by the Christmas commercialism that surrounds him:<\/p>\n I think there must be something wrong with me.\u00a0 I just don\u2019t understand Christmas, I guess.\u00a0 I might be getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I\u2019m still not happy.\u00a0 I don\u2019t feel the way I\u2019m supposed to feel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Importantly, this moment works in two ways, not just illuminating the troubled psyche of our yellow-shirted friend but also sending him down a rabbit hole that will end in a Christmas critique.[5]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Indeed, A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> is essentially a quest, a journey that Charlie Brown rather haphazardly undertakes to reconcile his expectations about Christmas with his responses to it.\u00a0 From the wall, Charlie Brown is flung across the iced pond to the feet of the Peanuts most solidly establishment figure, Lucy.\u00a0 Purveyor of lemonade-stand psychiatric advice[6]<\/sup><\/a>, Lucy hastens the process of Charlie\u2019s self-discovery by encouraging him to take on the role of director for the town\u2019s nativity play, a move she (mistakenly) believes will co-opt him.\u00a0 But in the end, Lucy\u2019s wish that Charlie Brown assimilate her view of Christmas backfires.<\/p>\n What we remember most is the tree.\u00a0 Despite Lucy\u2019s attempt to redeem Charlie by bringing him into the values of a contemporary Christmas, one in which the nativity play becomes a backdrop for \u201cpretty girls\u201d and jazz, Charlie is unmalleable, unable to give himself over the party atmosphere, but as yet unable to explain to himself the \u201cwhy\u201d of his unease.\u00a0 So Lucy casts him off the set\u2014with Linus, who is already ahead of Charlie in understanding what is amiss, recognizing that Christmas has become both \u201ctoo commercial\u201d and \u201ctoo dangerous\u201d\u2014and sends him off to get a tree that will create the \u201cproper\u201d Christmas spirit.\u00a0 This quality, no surprise, is seen rather differently by those who have drunk the Kool-Aid of a sparkly Christmas present and those who have not.\u00a0 We all remember that Lucy wants a giant, big, shiny aluminum tree\u2014Charlie doesn\u2019t know what he wants until he sees it.<\/p>\n The quest for the tree is fever dreamlike, epic.\u00a0 Charlie, Christlike, navigates the Sodom and Gomorrah of light polluting tree lots and redeems a little Lazarus tree[7]<\/sup><\/a>.\u00a0 Ok, technically it was Linus who elevated the tree, who made it beautiful by swaddling it in his blanket, covering it with ornaments from Snoopy\u2019s dog house, quoting Luke, and humming \u201cHark! The Herald Angel Sing.\u201d\u00a0 But the moment is transcendent for Charlie Brown and for the viewer.\u00a0 The narration included in the original script makes the revelatory nature of the moment clear: \u201cAt last, the season seemed 100 times brighter. And for Charlie Brown, it was truly the merriest Christmas ever\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a>.<\/p>\n To read A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em> as a text-in-isolation, what some have called a sacred reading and Eco sees as an experience of childhood innocence, is to open the possibility of seeing Charlie as a an honest broker of anti-capitalist ideology.\u00a0 If Lucy, as Eco argues, is society\u2019s representative, \u201ctreacherous, self-confident, an entrepreneur with assured profits, ready to peddle a security that is completely bogus but of unquestioned effect,\u201d then Charlie\u2019s (and Linus\u2019s) triumph in the Christmas special is freighted with meaning.\u00a0 Brought together not by (modern) things but by an overarching spiritual truth, the Peanuts end their Christmas special in solidarity against commercialism and consumerism.\u00a0 And lest there be any doubt that this is a feel-good moment, in which the audience is expected to partake, the special closes with the whole Peanuts gang loo-looing their way through Hark the Herald Angels Sing.<\/em>\u00a0 Be honest, you can hear it if you shut your eyes and think about it.<\/p>\n That\u2019s a powerful moment, capable of stopping full-throated last-minute shoppers in their tracks or quelling the sibling squabbling at the foot of the tree.\u00a0 But what does it mean?\u00a0 What does it mean for us to have an aha, I-so-get-the-real-meaning-of-Christmas moment, while watching an advertiser-paid-for Christmas special viewed against the backdrop of our own Christmas excesses?\u00a0 Thomas Frank, of course, would argue that Charlie Brown and the Peanuts and Charles Shultz are no more than stooges for capitalism.\u00a0 In \u201cDark Age: Why Johnny Can\u2019t dissent,\u201d Frank demonstrates the ways in which the media and entertainment industries[9]<\/sup><\/a> incorporate anti-capitalist sentiments into their programming and advertisements:<\/p>\n Now we are sold cars by an army of earringed, dreadlocked, goateed, tattooed, and guitar-bearing rebels rather than the lab-coated authority figures of the past.[10]<\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Frank argues that, \u201cfor all our radical soda pops\u201d and \u201calternative lifestyles,\u201d consumers allow corporations to govern our tastes and expression\u2014in the end, the \u201ccountercultural idea\u201d became \u201ccapitalist orthodoxy,\u201d and the consumer became a complicit party in that transformation. In Frank\u2019s reading the Peanuts cannot achieve dissent\u2014Charlie Brown cannot be truly rebellious\u2014because they are encapsulated in a vehicle designed for selling.\u00a0 To sell Coke, to sell Peanuts paraphernalia, a television channel, insurance.\u00a0 Seen in this light the anti-consumerist, pro-Christian ideals of A Charlie Brown Christmas <\/em>are simply another advertising strategy, designed to give a desirable moment of feel-good old-fashioned Christmas as tonic to the buying.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/f18-engl117-01\/files\/2017\/12\/The-Wall.gif\")
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