Charlie Brown: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents and sending Christmas cards and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.
Linus Van Pelt: Charlie Brown, you're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy's right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest.
The opening scene to A Charlie Brown Christmas keeps running through my head, and not only because my daughter watched it in a constantly-alternating pattern with greatly inferior sequel, It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown, for several weeks leading up to the holiday. I had a rather Charlie Brown-y Christmas this year, the Charlie Browniest in quite awhile.
From an early age I have identified with Charlie Brown, and the first TV specials are a touchstone to my childhood (though I admit I started losing interest somewhere between A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown). The first portion of scripture I memorized was Linus' quotation in the Christmas special from Luke 2 (for one of my earliest attempts at being a director and staging a Christmas play), and much of my own artwork, and some of my sense of characters and dialog, were developed from copying Peanuts comics as a child.
But my problems with this Christmas are not Charlie Brown's. I'm not suffering from "pantophobia", and I certainly DON'T need more "involvement"! The commercialism of the season is not particularly vexing (any more than it has been since Charlie Brown first declared, "I won't let this commercial dog spoil MY Christmas"), and I don't need Linus to "tell me what Christmas is all about." I know all of that, at least in my head...
Charlie Brown's disappointment at not receiving Christmas cards gets more to my own feeling. I am missing people, and the human connection that I associate with the holiday season. In particular, I am missing my grandparents, around whom the holiday always revolved prior to their passing in 2003, one month apart, when my daughter was less than a year old. I don't think my family has yet figured out how to celebrate the day without them. John Irving writes in A Prayer for Owen Meany, "Christmas is our time to be aware of what we lack, of who's not home," and that rings very true.
Missing Grandma and Grandad as people is understandable, and even I suppose admirable in some ways, but the fact of the matter is I also miss their gifts. I never figured out exactly where they got their money from, but every Christmas (at least while they were able-bodied and capable of shopping) my grandparents would go all-out, and we could count on there being a mountain of presents beneath their tree. Being together as a family was good, but most of my youth and for periods of my adulthood we lived close enough that we did that pretty much on a weekly basis. The Christmas dinner was always good and a major part of the day, but really it was just a repeat of the Thanksgiving meal a month later. No, what made Christmas unique, as far as our family gathering was concerned, was the exchange of presents, the majority of them coming from my grandparents. Without them, and with the rest of us on fixed incomes or being underemployed, no one can afford to be Santa anymore, and when Christmas is mostly about presents, the death of Santa leaves a serious hole in the holiday.
I don't want or believe Christmas to be all about presents. There is much that I do by myself, with my wife and daughter, and with my church in worship and service that are clearly more focused on the spiritual reality of Christ's birth and the day that celebrates it. But getting together with my mother, sister and aunt, it is hard not to lapse into those expectations of Christmas Past when we could see how much we were loved by how much money someone spent on us. And it's hard not to want to do for my daughter what was done for me (wrapped in the haze of happy nostalgia as it is), even though I can now see the folly of it.
So, this is an area where my character needs development...
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