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Lee Mendelson Film Productions

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Twenty-five minutes in which Charlie Brown cannot work out why Christmas depresses him, directs a disastrous school play, and buys a dying tree. Linus then walks to the centre of an empty stage and recites Luke 2 from memory.

ProvisionalFamily & childrenInterdenominational
Where to watch

Why this is listed

One scene earns the whole listing. Linus reciting Luke 2:8-14 in the King James Version, unaccompanied, in a network cartoon, is the plainest reading of Scripture most children will ever meet in mainstream television — and the network is widely reported to have wanted it cut.

Before you press play

Nothing here is frightening and nothing is invented about the passage — Linus recites Luke straight, without paraphrase. The rest is a gentle story about commercialised Christmas, and the only thing a sensitive small child tends to mind is that Charlie Brown is mocked by the other children for most of the running time. The theology on offer is a single verse read aloud, which is both its limit and its power.

Suited to All ages. Age judgements are ours, not a rating board’s — you know your own family.

How to start

  1. Open peanuts.com (opens an external site) and read what Lee Mendelson Film Productions says about itself before you read anything else.
  2. Read the note above first. It is there so an evening does not go wrong twenty minutes in.
  3. Watch it yourself before you watch it with children, if there are children.
  4. Read the passage it dramatises alongside it. The point is to send you back to the text, not to replace it.
  5. Afterwards, ask what the story added and what it left out. That conversation is worth more than the film.

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