A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

Another one of those classic old children’s Christmas shows I first watched who knows when, but probably when it first came out, and have seen a couple dozen more times since then. When dealing with a show I loved as a kid, I refuse to try to separate the adult viewer and rate it more harshly. The memory and the childish feelings I had for it are wrapped up in its value for me. For example, I am an atheist, so the nativity story doesn’t carry a religious message for me, but I can appreciate its function in the story, and I read a lot of other fictional mythical origin stories without being cynical. It is funny that our minds connect the jazz theme with Christmas, when it is, well, jazz. Also an oddity that Bill Melendez was the producer, director and voice (such as it was) for Snoopy. They used children for a lot of the voices, rather than adults simulating child voices. It would be interesting to learn how children nowadays respond to seeing this old show for the first time, after being exposed to many other modern shows and animation techniques, video games, etc.