Celebrating the 12 days of Christmas, today we’re starting 12 days of classic Christmas songs. Our first classic Christmas song is “Christmas Time is Here” by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, from that holiday classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas. The tune is jazzy and a just a little melancholy.
The early- to mid-60s was a golden time for television and for televised Christmas specials. We got classic TV like The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Batman, Get Smart, The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and lots, lots more. In terms of Christmas specials, my favorites, all of which debuted within a few years of each other when I was in elementary school, included Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (with all those wonderful Burl Ives songs), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (a perfect melding of story by Dr. Seuss, animation by Chuck Jones, and narration by Boris Karloff), and, of course, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Folks today probably don’t think often of Charles Schultz’ Peanuts comic strip, but when I was a kid it was as big and as influential as Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes were later. I remember when I was in fourth grade, I decided to write and publish a classroom newspaper, which admittedly was a little forward-thinking for a nine year-old, but I’ve always been slightly ahead of my peers. I called the paper the Peanuts Press, and had an illustration of Snoopy and his dog house on the masthead. (I wrote most of the articles and edited the thing, my mom typed it up on an old manual typewriter, and my grandfather ran off copies on his office’s mimeograph machine. What an operation!)
I was seven years old when A Charlie Brown Christmas was first telecast in 1965. (I watched it on WISH-TV channel 8, our local Indianapolis CBS station.) Nobody had any idea how they’d animate Schultz’s comic strips, but producer Lee Mendelson and director Bill Melendez did it right. They captured the heart and soul of the comic strip, and then some, creating a gentle look into the world of Peanuts along with an inspiring take on the Christmas spirit. Everybody remembers Charlie Brown’s scrawny Christmas tree, the kids ice skating on the rink, and Linus’ moving reading of the Christmas story. It touched lots of little (and big) hearts then and in the ensuing decades.
A large part of the charm came from Vince Guaraldi’s jazz-inspired score. Vince and his trio (Vince on piano, Monty Budwig on bass, and Jerry Granelli on drums) captured the essence of Charlie Brown and the neighborhood kids and applied their jazzy sound to a variety of Christmas carols and original tunes. It would be hard today to imagine the Peanuts gang without Guaraldi’s music—or to get through Christmas without the trio’s versions of “Christmas Time is Here,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” or “Linus and Lucy,” the de facto theme song for the Peanuts gang.
The music for the special was inspired by Guaraldi’s work for an earlier planned Peanuts documentary titled A Boy Named Charlie Brown that never saw the light of day. Guaraldi recycled the tune “Linus and Lucy,” which really defined the animated Peanuts ethic, and added new ones like “Christmas Time is Here” and “Skating,” as well as jazz versions of a bunch of traditional tunes. The result was the perfect soundtrack for the Christmas season and introduced generations of kids (and their parents) to cool jazz.
Make no mistake, “Christmas Time is Here” is definitely a jazz composition. It’s all extended chords throughout—FMaj7 to Eb7, repeated, then a nice descending run (“Fun for all/That children call/Their favorite time of year”) of Bm7 to Bb7 to Am7 to Ab7 to Gm7, ending with a satisfying C to F cadence. The end result sounds just like Christmas to me.
A Charlie Brown Christmas featured two versions of “Christmas Time is Here,” the choral version (with words by producer Lee Mendelson) sung by kids from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in San Rafael, California, and a longer instrumental version by the trio. All I know is when I hear this song I think of Christmas. (And Jerry Granelli’s excellent brushwork—it sounds just like snow falling!)
