Recently, there has been a great deal of hubbub about the fact that Apple TV+ now owns the rights to the Peanuts holiday specials, from the Great Pumpkin to Christmas to the Easter Beagle. Apple+ flaunted the fact that the perennial A Charlie Brown Christmas would not air on broadcast TV for the first time in 55 years.
Of course, after much public outcry and hate leveled against Apple TV+, the company switched course. Now, it is allowing PBS to air the shows. A good compromise, I suppose. However, I still yearn for those times when my whole family would gather in the living room and watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. It marked the beginning of the holiday season every year for me. And I yearn for those Dolly Madison Zingers commercials, as well.
Tonight, in my own little protest of the ending of a 55-year tradition, I am going to share an essay I wrote a couple years ago for Christmas. I had just lost my dad, and it seemed like the holidays were slipping through my fingers like melting snow. But Charlie Brown still showed up on TV that December, like clockwork, and I remembered how much my father loved Snoopy's dance when Schroeder played the piano.
Saint Marty needs to buy himself some Zingers tomorrow.
(Cue Christmas Time Is Here . . .)
A Charlie Brown Advent
by: Martin Achatz
1. Would you believe me if I told you that I am haunted by Charlie Brown this December? That, before I went to bed last night, as I was brushing my teeth, I heard a nine-year-old girl’s therapist voice in the dark kitchen say “Do you think you have pantophobia?” as if all the fears of the world—hunger and homelessness and isolation and abandonment and poverty and war—were lined up outside the bathroom door like second graders at recess?
2. “The early bird gets the worm, but the late bird doesn’t even get the late worm.”
--Charles M. Schulz
3. My dad had to be first. Always. He woke at 4:30 in the morning to get the first coffee. At supper, his plate was full before anyone else sat down at the table, and he was forking meatloaf into his mouth before my mother intoned, “Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts . . .” First to rake leaves in the fall, snowblow after a blizzard, mow his lawn come April. The trees in his yard were the tallest in the neighborhood. Grass, the greenest. This past February, as he lay dying in a hospital bed, he kept kicking off his blankets, trying to pull himself upright, as if he wanted to be the first at the door to meet what was coming. A tunnel of light. Black hole of oblivion. Saint Peter, surrounded by a cloud of cosmic dust. Perhaps the soil of ancient Babylon, trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar.
4. “Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.”
--Charles M. Schulz.
5. It’s all about spreading and fluffing. Making piles of branches on the floor, shortest to longest. They used to be color-coded, their tips shades of blue jay blue, parakeet green, Woodstock yellow, snow bunting white. The map of these colors has disappeared, so we navigate the process now like dirt roads in the woods. Take Blue Branch Trail to where it forks at Brown Branch Gully. Turn left. Follow the two-rut until it intersects Gold Branch Pass and Black Branch Canyon. Keep straight. Follow the star up ahead all the way to County Road Tree Top.
6. In the photo, Sparky Schulz stands in the backyard of his Minneapolis home. It’s 1926, and he is four years old. His dog, Snooky, sniffs at his feet. Beside them squats a barrel of a snowman with a wide mouth and eyes like ink spots. It’s three years before the Stock Market Crash. Seventeen years before his mother, terminal with cancer, looked up at him from her bed when he was leaving for Army boot camp and said, “Well, good-bye, Sparky. We’ll probably never see each other again.” Twenty-four years before a boy with a barrel body and ink spot eyes first appeared in a comic strip with Shermy and Patty, Shermy remarking, “Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!”
7. “I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.”
--Charles. M. Schulz
8. Darkness is a thing now. It pushes morning back to eight or eight-thirty. Rushes afternoon out the door by four-thirty or five o’clock. That’s about eight to nine hours of sunlight a day, most of it sweatered in clouds and snow. In a week, the longest night of the year, when the dead can visit the living, when animals can speak. Cows tell jokes to pigs: What do you see when a duck bends over? Butt quack. Nuthatches and waxwings sing hosannas to a smirk of moon. Beagles do impressions of sheep and penguins.
9. My father died one week before Valentine’s Day, my mother—his little red-haired girl of 64 years—sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. For several hours, his body had been playing a game of crack the whip, drifting one way, shifting suddenly in the opposite direction, then back again, as if trying to send him spinning off into a snowbank where he’d be swallowed in powder. My mother rubbed her fingers against his knuckles, saying over and over, “You’ve been a good husband . . . a good father . . . Yes, you have . . .” I watched his face crumple like an old lunch bag.
10. Charlie Brown lamenting to Linus about never seeing the little red-haired girl again: “. . . I thought I had plenty of time . . . I thought I could wait until the sixth grade swim party or the seventh grade class party . . . Or I thought I could ask her to the senior prom or lots of other things when we got older. But now she’s moving away and it’s too late! It’s too late! . . . I’ve never even said hello to her!!”
11. Later in life, Sparky Schulz became obsessed with the movie Citizen Kane, especially the scene where Kane’s mother prepares to send her little boy away, never to see him again, saying, “I’ve got his trunk all packed. I’ve had it packed for a week now.”
12. In my mind, I see Charlie Brown inside the snow globe from Citizen Kane, standing beside the tiny Alpine-looking cabin, snowflake dander drifting around him like radioactive fallout. He stares up at the convex glass heavens, whispers, “Rosebud?”
13. “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. What am I doing right?”
--Charles M. Schulz.
14. My father was a chronic rearranger of lights and ornaments. No bare spots. No dark holes. Everything full of sequin and incandescence and spark. More Snoopy than Charlie Brown. Maybe it was a grasping for perfection, something that reflected beginning more than ending. Genesis over Revelations. Big Bang over T. S. Eliot whimper. Birth over death. Christmas over Easter.
15. Am I haunted or obsessed? In my dreams, I’m an India-ink sketch, with words and sounds written above my head in thick, bold letters. This morning, I turned on my car radio and heard Vince Guaraldi playing jazz piano, tripping across the keys like a parade of fat snowflakes, the bass line a steady plow. It was still dark. Down the street, my neighbor’s house was garish against the ice and stars, a spotlight of Yuletide attention that blinked like an “Open” sign at a gas station: Christmas Here, Christmas Here, Christmas Here. Over and over. My father would have loved this.
16. “I gave up trying to understand people long ago. Now I let them try to understand me!”
--Charles M. Schulz
17. Sparky Schulz was a religious guy who didn’t make his kids go to church. They went horseback riding while he sat in his yellow chair and read the Scriptures. In his house at Christmas time, a wooden crèche sat on a coffee table without explanation, as if its presence was significant enough without a Sunday school lesson. In his Bible, scribbled across Matthew’s gospel narrative of Christ’s birth, were these words: “The Christmas story is a story of purity and can be appreciated only by the pure mind.” Cue music: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” with looing.
18. My father would cut out Charlie Brown comic strips from the newspaper, scratch the name of one of his kids above Linus or Lucy or Sally, and magnet it to the refrigerator. It would stay posted there for months. He would use them for bookmarks, along with holy cards of Saint Francis and Saint John Vianney. One of his favorites: Charlie Brown sitting on a curb as it starts to rain. Charlie looks up as the rain gets stronger, harder. In the final panel, he’s nearly obscured by thick lines of downpour, and he comments, “It always rains on the unloved!” My father wrote my name in wide blue letters over Charlie Brown’s head. M. A. R. T. Y.
19. “Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown, maybe painted pink.”
--Lucy Van Pelt
20. Near the top of my tree, a crystal Snoopy on a sled. It catches the pink bulb behind it, refracts tiny prisms into the needles and branches. At night, when the living room is dark, an arc of Snoopy light sits on the ceiling like a raised eyebrow or crescent of scar.
21. My mother’s memory is an impermanent thing now. Her days are a series of questions and observations. “Is it cold outside?” and “How was your day?” and “I guess I should be heading home” (she is always home) and “Drive safe” (as I am going out the front door). Most recent additions: ‘Your father has been gone all day” and “Where is your father?” and “Your father never tells me where he’s going.” She paces, shakes her head, pushes her walker back and forth, kitchen to living room to bathroom to bedroom, as if she’s Linus and her blanket is missing.
22. A few months after Charlie Brown first learned the true meaning of Christmas, Sparky’s father died of a massive heart attack while visiting his son. Sparky didn’t attend the wake or memorial service, claiming he was afraid to fly. Much later, he said, “It’s so complicated. I suppose I’ve always felt that way—apprehensive, anxious, that sort of thing. I’ve compared it sometimes to the feeling that you have when you get up on the morning of a funeral.”
23. Sitting in her chair one night a month or so ago, my mother looked over at my father’s empty seat and said, “There you are. Where have you been?” For the next 20 minutes, she spoke with my father about chicken noodle soup and car troubles and taxes. How time was moving so fast from Great Pumpkin to Christmas. At the end, she nodded, said, “I miss you, too,” then put her head back and closed her eyes.
24. Linus to Charlie Brown: “Sure, Charlie Brown. I can tell you what Christmas is all about . . .”
25. It’s about finding love when you’re lost.
3. My dad had to be first. Always. He woke at 4:30 in the morning to get the first coffee. At supper, his plate was full before anyone else sat down at the table, and he was forking meatloaf into his mouth before my mother intoned, “Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts . . .” First to rake leaves in the fall, snowblow after a blizzard, mow his lawn come April. The trees in his yard were the tallest in the neighborhood. Grass, the greenest. This past February, as he lay dying in a hospital bed, he kept kicking off his blankets, trying to pull himself upright, as if he wanted to be the first at the door to meet what was coming. A tunnel of light. Black hole of oblivion. Saint Peter, surrounded by a cloud of cosmic dust. Perhaps the soil of ancient Babylon, trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar.
4. “Decorate your home. It gives the illusion that your life is more interesting than it really is.”
--Charles M. Schulz.
5. It’s all about spreading and fluffing. Making piles of branches on the floor, shortest to longest. They used to be color-coded, their tips shades of blue jay blue, parakeet green, Woodstock yellow, snow bunting white. The map of these colors has disappeared, so we navigate the process now like dirt roads in the woods. Take Blue Branch Trail to where it forks at Brown Branch Gully. Turn left. Follow the two-rut until it intersects Gold Branch Pass and Black Branch Canyon. Keep straight. Follow the star up ahead all the way to County Road Tree Top.
6. In the photo, Sparky Schulz stands in the backyard of his Minneapolis home. It’s 1926, and he is four years old. His dog, Snooky, sniffs at his feet. Beside them squats a barrel of a snowman with a wide mouth and eyes like ink spots. It’s three years before the Stock Market Crash. Seventeen years before his mother, terminal with cancer, looked up at him from her bed when he was leaving for Army boot camp and said, “Well, good-bye, Sparky. We’ll probably never see each other again.” Twenty-four years before a boy with a barrel body and ink spot eyes first appeared in a comic strip with Shermy and Patty, Shermy remarking, “Good ol’ Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!”
7. “I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time.”
--Charles. M. Schulz
8. Darkness is a thing now. It pushes morning back to eight or eight-thirty. Rushes afternoon out the door by four-thirty or five o’clock. That’s about eight to nine hours of sunlight a day, most of it sweatered in clouds and snow. In a week, the longest night of the year, when the dead can visit the living, when animals can speak. Cows tell jokes to pigs: What do you see when a duck bends over? Butt quack. Nuthatches and waxwings sing hosannas to a smirk of moon. Beagles do impressions of sheep and penguins.
9. My father died one week before Valentine’s Day, my mother—his little red-haired girl of 64 years—sitting beside his bed, holding his hand. For several hours, his body had been playing a game of crack the whip, drifting one way, shifting suddenly in the opposite direction, then back again, as if trying to send him spinning off into a snowbank where he’d be swallowed in powder. My mother rubbed her fingers against his knuckles, saying over and over, “You’ve been a good husband . . . a good father . . . Yes, you have . . .” I watched his face crumple like an old lunch bag.
10. Charlie Brown lamenting to Linus about never seeing the little red-haired girl again: “. . . I thought I had plenty of time . . . I thought I could wait until the sixth grade swim party or the seventh grade class party . . . Or I thought I could ask her to the senior prom or lots of other things when we got older. But now she’s moving away and it’s too late! It’s too late! . . . I’ve never even said hello to her!!”
11. Later in life, Sparky Schulz became obsessed with the movie Citizen Kane, especially the scene where Kane’s mother prepares to send her little boy away, never to see him again, saying, “I’ve got his trunk all packed. I’ve had it packed for a week now.”
12. In my mind, I see Charlie Brown inside the snow globe from Citizen Kane, standing beside the tiny Alpine-looking cabin, snowflake dander drifting around him like radioactive fallout. He stares up at the convex glass heavens, whispers, “Rosebud?”
13. “My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. What am I doing right?”
--Charles M. Schulz.
14. My father was a chronic rearranger of lights and ornaments. No bare spots. No dark holes. Everything full of sequin and incandescence and spark. More Snoopy than Charlie Brown. Maybe it was a grasping for perfection, something that reflected beginning more than ending. Genesis over Revelations. Big Bang over T. S. Eliot whimper. Birth over death. Christmas over Easter.
15. Am I haunted or obsessed? In my dreams, I’m an India-ink sketch, with words and sounds written above my head in thick, bold letters. This morning, I turned on my car radio and heard Vince Guaraldi playing jazz piano, tripping across the keys like a parade of fat snowflakes, the bass line a steady plow. It was still dark. Down the street, my neighbor’s house was garish against the ice and stars, a spotlight of Yuletide attention that blinked like an “Open” sign at a gas station: Christmas Here, Christmas Here, Christmas Here. Over and over. My father would have loved this.
16. “I gave up trying to understand people long ago. Now I let them try to understand me!”
--Charles M. Schulz
17. Sparky Schulz was a religious guy who didn’t make his kids go to church. They went horseback riding while he sat in his yellow chair and read the Scriptures. In his house at Christmas time, a wooden crèche sat on a coffee table without explanation, as if its presence was significant enough without a Sunday school lesson. In his Bible, scribbled across Matthew’s gospel narrative of Christ’s birth, were these words: “The Christmas story is a story of purity and can be appreciated only by the pure mind.” Cue music: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” with looing.
18. My father would cut out Charlie Brown comic strips from the newspaper, scratch the name of one of his kids above Linus or Lucy or Sally, and magnet it to the refrigerator. It would stay posted there for months. He would use them for bookmarks, along with holy cards of Saint Francis and Saint John Vianney. One of his favorites: Charlie Brown sitting on a curb as it starts to rain. Charlie looks up as the rain gets stronger, harder. In the final panel, he’s nearly obscured by thick lines of downpour, and he comments, “It always rains on the unloved!” My father wrote my name in wide blue letters over Charlie Brown’s head. M. A. R. T. Y.
19. “Get the biggest aluminum tree you can find, Charlie Brown, maybe painted pink.”
--Lucy Van Pelt
20. Near the top of my tree, a crystal Snoopy on a sled. It catches the pink bulb behind it, refracts tiny prisms into the needles and branches. At night, when the living room is dark, an arc of Snoopy light sits on the ceiling like a raised eyebrow or crescent of scar.
21. My mother’s memory is an impermanent thing now. Her days are a series of questions and observations. “Is it cold outside?” and “How was your day?” and “I guess I should be heading home” (she is always home) and “Drive safe” (as I am going out the front door). Most recent additions: ‘Your father has been gone all day” and “Where is your father?” and “Your father never tells me where he’s going.” She paces, shakes her head, pushes her walker back and forth, kitchen to living room to bathroom to bedroom, as if she’s Linus and her blanket is missing.
22. A few months after Charlie Brown first learned the true meaning of Christmas, Sparky’s father died of a massive heart attack while visiting his son. Sparky didn’t attend the wake or memorial service, claiming he was afraid to fly. Much later, he said, “It’s so complicated. I suppose I’ve always felt that way—apprehensive, anxious, that sort of thing. I’ve compared it sometimes to the feeling that you have when you get up on the morning of a funeral.”
23. Sitting in her chair one night a month or so ago, my mother looked over at my father’s empty seat and said, “There you are. Where have you been?” For the next 20 minutes, she spoke with my father about chicken noodle soup and car troubles and taxes. How time was moving so fast from Great Pumpkin to Christmas. At the end, she nodded, said, “I miss you, too,” then put her head back and closed her eyes.
24. Linus to Charlie Brown: “Sure, Charlie Brown. I can tell you what Christmas is all about . . .”
25. It’s about finding love when you’re lost.
