Christmastime is here and so is your annual break-up with your high school boyfriend, Mark. Ever since sophomore year, you and Mark have shared the Christmas tradition of drinking mediocre Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru hot chocolate, popping a copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas into your mostly-broken VHS, and having “the talk.” With a yule log roaring in the fireplace and Schroeder’s cheerful piano jingling in the background, you tell Mark that it’s over in an uncomfortably long conversation that lasts the entire 25 minutes of the holiday special. Mark always cries as the Peanuts sing “Hark the Herald Angels,” which makes you feel like a real jerk so you take him back every time. It’s such a fun way to celebrate the holidays!
Even though this tradition has been going on for the past nineteen years, you have no idea what happens in A Charlie Brown Christmas. You’re pretty sure there’s some kind of Christmas pageant, but then again, your mind is so consumed with thoughts of Mark’s faults that all you can hear is muted-trombone.
Here are some things you might have missed from the movie while being preoccupied by Mark’s fragile ego.
Charlie Brown is a child.
If someone asked you to summarize A Charlie Brown Christmas you would say it is about an angry man who has seasonal affective disorder. With his premature balding and miserly voice, a cursory glance at Charlie Brown affirms this synopsis, but in reality, Charlie Brown is a small unhappy boy. But of course you don’t know this because three minutes into each viewing, you stop paying attention once you recall that the characters are called the “Peanuts” and that Mark once tried to gaslight you into believing that George Washington Carver invented the peanut. This grotesque flashback reminds you of your ultimate purpose (to break up with your loser boyfriend), so you leisurely turn to him with a gentle “hey, so…it’s not working out.”
There is definitely a girl sniffing her pits and passing it off as dancing.
At approximately 8 minutes and 28 seconds into your viewing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, you and Mark sit in awkward silence because you have just accused Mark of scrubbing his athlete’s foot with your toothbrush. This is also the moment at which the iconic dance scene begins. You try to enjoy the campy jazz melody and the erratic choreography, but you’re not paying close enough attention to the sequence to notice that the girl in the green dress is checking out her B.O. and pretending that it’s her signature move. It’s a shame that you’re missing this beloved detail that everyone definitely knows and cares about except you.
There’s a small dog who can read, use a hammer, and eat bones.
A Charlie Brown Christmas is a piece of surrealist avant garde film colored in bright magentas and deep mustards that you are not appreciating because you are always delivering a soliloquy to Mark about his habit of not wearing pants when your parents are around. One innovation that you have overlooked is the character Snoopy: a plucky beagle pushing the boundaries of what it means to be an animal. He can interpret stage directions, construct an award winning holiday display, and digest pounds of hard tissue. If you had an actually good boyfriend instead of Mark, who owns pants but apparently never cares to wear them, then maybe you’d be appreciating this film for its contributions to the motion picture.
The tree is very bad and that’s the point!
If you were asked “so what’s the deal with the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas?” you would say “oh it’s such a great tree, probably the greenest tree ever, or am I mistaken because at the point in A Charlie Brown Christmas where Old Man Charlie Brown is visited by the Ghost of Trees Past I am rethinking whether I should have broken up with Mark because he does sweet things like make toast for me sometimes and pay half of the rent in the apartment we’ve shared since we graduated from college twelve years ago which makes me realize that it’s inevitable that I will take Mark back and that we will have a sloppy under-the-mistletoe make-out while the VHS rewinds.” Maybe next year you’ll notice how feeble the tree is, or maybe you’ll be complaining that Mark never picks up your three children from school. Either way, it will be a viewing you’ll never forget!
