Christmas Eve Eve Eve Open Thread

Still buried under trying to get a thousand and one things done before Christmas, as I suspect many of you are. Christmas cards? Done. Christmas shopping? Done. Christmas wrapping? Done. Photo CDs of family pix taken throughout the year? In progress. Trying to complete enough primary job work so I don’t have to work more than a few hours from home next week? In progress – big time.

Whew! What a month.

Posting one of my favorite Christmas classics TV clips: The Meaning of Christmas from A Charlie Brown Christmas:

Here’s an interesting story from 2005 on how the Charlie Brown Christmas story almost didn’t make it to TV. Snippets:

When CBS bigwigs saw a rough cut of A Charlie Brown Christmas in November 1965, they hated it.

“They said it was slow,” executive producer Lee Mendelson remembers with a laugh. There were concerns that the show was almost defiantly different: There was no laugh track, real children provided the voices, and there was a swinging score by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez fretted about the insistence by Peanuts creator Charles Schulz that his first-ever TV spinoff end with a reading of the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke by a lisping little boy named Linus.

“We told Schulz, ‘Look, you can’t read from the Bible on network television,’ ” Mendelson says. “When we finished the show and watched it, Melendez and I looked at each other and I said, ‘We’ve ruined Charlie Brown.’ ”

Good grief, were they wrong. The first broadcast was watched by almost 50% of the nation’s viewers. “When I started reading the reviews, I was absolutely shocked,” says Melendez, 89. “They actually liked it!”

And we still do. :)

Comments are closed.