OK, so I am following up yesterday's post with a bookend.
As I sit here, I am listening to the Christmas song that, for my money, is the best one ever. And it doesn't even have lyrics, and is performed by a jazz trio.
Can you guess what song it is?
Christmas, 1965. I am ten years old, brother Jim is eleven, and our little brother Keith is five. A Charlie Brown Christmas airs for the first time.
This is the sixties, of course, and for kids there were not many programming choices. We were restricted to three VHF channels plus PBS, and UHF channels were just beginning to program.
A new Christmas special was a big event. Especially an animated one; most Christmas specials were made up of a male crooner, a gaggle of cute kids, and various comedy sketches that were not particularly funny if you were six.
The interesting thing is that a Charlie Brown Christmas, while it has its funny moments, has a very serious message, and is really quite adult in its view of the need to keep the shallowness of commercialism from overtaking the most sacred Christian holiday. Of course, the Peanuts strip on which it was based was really an adult strip that used children to expore issues of loneliness, alienation and self-esteem.
Yet, this Christmas special hits the nail right on the head. It explains Christmas in a way comprehensible even to small children with a meaningful story, clever dialog, bad animation and the best score of any Christmas show ever, by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
When I was in college, there was a showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV that drew a rapt crowd of post-adolescents, all of whom had seen the show many times before, to sit quietly on the floor in the middle of a party for a half hour.
My favorite scene remains the one wherein all of the characters dance those unforgettable, idiosyncratic dances on the stage of the auditorium while Schroeder plays the song Linus and Lucy. This really captured the imagination of my generation.
The song was so compelling that it was the first thing I attempted to play on the piano my parents bought for me when I was 16.
Many years after the college party, I went to a George Winston concert at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. George played the beautiful, atmospheric jazz piano he is known for in a turtleneck and jeans, and stocking feet. The show was in early December; late in the concert he turned to the audience and said that anyone who wanted to dance to the next song was welcome on stage.
The he launched into Linus and Lucy.
For an instant, the audience stayed in their seats; and then, a man came tearing down the aisle, bounded onto the stage, and began the shoulder-shrugging, foot-twisting dance. Immediately, others ran to follow him, until the stage was so full no one else could have possibly fit.
Each person was doing some variation of the Peanuts dances; the sleepwalk, the twins' sideways head-jerk and hop, the zombie arm reach, and of course the Linus head-down, arm-pumping, closed-fist shuffle. All of them were unutterably happy.
I stayed in the audience, too stunned to move. It was like the cartoon come spontaneously to life.
These days, my family's custom is to trim the Christmas tree while listening to my twenty-year-old CD of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It is my son Spencer's favorite Christmas CD.
When it comes to sacred Christmas carols, the best one, in my humble opinion, is Silent Night. But for the secular, joyful, dancing in the aisles, childlike side of Christmas, you just can't beat Linus and Lucy.
Put on your dancing shoes, and let the shoulder shrugging begin.
As I sit here, I am listening to the Christmas song that, for my money, is the best one ever. And it doesn't even have lyrics, and is performed by a jazz trio.
Can you guess what song it is?
Christmas, 1965. I am ten years old, brother Jim is eleven, and our little brother Keith is five. A Charlie Brown Christmas airs for the first time.
This is the sixties, of course, and for kids there were not many programming choices. We were restricted to three VHF channels plus PBS, and UHF channels were just beginning to program.
A new Christmas special was a big event. Especially an animated one; most Christmas specials were made up of a male crooner, a gaggle of cute kids, and various comedy sketches that were not particularly funny if you were six.
The interesting thing is that a Charlie Brown Christmas, while it has its funny moments, has a very serious message, and is really quite adult in its view of the need to keep the shallowness of commercialism from overtaking the most sacred Christian holiday. Of course, the Peanuts strip on which it was based was really an adult strip that used children to expore issues of loneliness, alienation and self-esteem.
Yet, this Christmas special hits the nail right on the head. It explains Christmas in a way comprehensible even to small children with a meaningful story, clever dialog, bad animation and the best score of any Christmas show ever, by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
When I was in college, there was a showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV that drew a rapt crowd of post-adolescents, all of whom had seen the show many times before, to sit quietly on the floor in the middle of a party for a half hour.
My favorite scene remains the one wherein all of the characters dance those unforgettable, idiosyncratic dances on the stage of the auditorium while Schroeder plays the song Linus and Lucy. This really captured the imagination of my generation.
The song was so compelling that it was the first thing I attempted to play on the piano my parents bought for me when I was 16.
Many years after the college party, I went to a George Winston concert at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. George played the beautiful, atmospheric jazz piano he is known for in a turtleneck and jeans, and stocking feet. The show was in early December; late in the concert he turned to the audience and said that anyone who wanted to dance to the next song was welcome on stage.
The he launched into Linus and Lucy.
For an instant, the audience stayed in their seats; and then, a man came tearing down the aisle, bounded onto the stage, and began the shoulder-shrugging, foot-twisting dance. Immediately, others ran to follow him, until the stage was so full no one else could have possibly fit.
Each person was doing some variation of the Peanuts dances; the sleepwalk, the twins' sideways head-jerk and hop, the zombie arm reach, and of course the Linus head-down, arm-pumping, closed-fist shuffle. All of them were unutterably happy.
I stayed in the audience, too stunned to move. It was like the cartoon come spontaneously to life.
These days, my family's custom is to trim the Christmas tree while listening to my twenty-year-old CD of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It is my son Spencer's favorite Christmas CD.
When it comes to sacred Christmas carols, the best one, in my humble opinion, is Silent Night. But for the secular, joyful, dancing in the aisles, childlike side of Christmas, you just can't beat Linus and Lucy.
Put on your dancing shoes, and let the shoulder shrugging begin.
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