At a middle school in Texas, a nurse’s aide plastered her office door with a festive handmade poster quoting Linus’s scripture recitation from A Charlie Brown Christmas:
The principal of Patterson Middle School in Killeen, Texas asked the aide, Dedra Shannon, to remove the decoration on December 7. But with Texas’s “Merry Christmas Law” and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on her side, Shannon lawyered up. A week later, a county judge ruled in her favor, leveling a temporary restraining order against the school board, while the attorney general hit them with a separate suit to defend “proper interpretation and application of [Texas’s] laws.”
Along with Charlie Brown’s unimpressive tree and this dangerously catchy dance number, Linus’s revelation is a scene we all know from the yearly ritual cartoon Christmas special.
He drags his blanket center stage, to answer bereft Charlie Brown’s outburst “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?” with the annunciation to the shepherds as told by the Gospel of Luke, King James Version. “Sure, Charlie Brown. I can tell you what Christmas is all about,” Linus steps up. But first, he asks, “Lights, please?”
Linus, over-sensitive and a little weird, is a smart kid. He gets something other kids overlook: that the incarnation was truly a radical event. Linus and Charlie Brown’s commercially-preoccupied classmates need a reminder of the existential sea-change at the heart of the holly-jolly holiday season.
Charles Schulz seems to have thought so too. He fought CBS executives on the particulars of the Christmas special, including Linus’s Lucan monologue.
Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the program. And according to a bio.com article celebrating its legacy, Schulz’s producer and director agreed with CBS that religion has no place in cartoons.
Schulz preferred to keep the scene, saying, “If we don’t do it, who will? We can do it.”
Network executives also tried to block the beloved jazz soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio—in favor of something hipper. Good grief.
