Christmas season, 2007, Seattle resident Art Conrad, fed up with the commercialization of Christmas, erects Santa-on-the-cross in his yard to protest.
Ten years earlier, Robert Cenedella paints Santa on a crucifix. In Catholics decry crucified Santa, Bangor Daily News, 23 December 1997, Cenedella says, he was not responsible for replacing Christ with Santa Claus. You can point the finger at capitalism.
Afterall, Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, ya know, as Lucy Van Pelt says in the 1965 classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
In the special, Lucy gets Charlie, depressed by the commercialization of Christmas, to direct the school play. When it’s time to get a tree, Lucy suggests he get a great big shiny aluminum Christmas tree, the biggest aluminum tree you can find. He instead finds a pathetic, real tree, prompting Linus to ask, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?
Today I will be talking about that tree, what it was, what it has become, and why.
First, let’s look at that tree, and how the Christmas special was conceived.
As Robert Wilonsky recounts in Bless the Blockhead, Dallas Observer, 7 December 2000, given the task of making a Christmas special for Coca-Cola, Charles Schulz told his producer, I want this show to express what I think is the true meaning of Christmas.
According to Joseph B Perry in Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday, Journal of Social History, Fall 2002, once a year, hegemonic American institutions, including church, state, the media, and commercial interests, line up to produce a discourse about what Christmas means.
Schulz thought about what was the opposite of the true meaning of Christmas and that was commercialism.
As Charlie Brown says, I won’t let all this commercialism ruin my Christmas. And neither would Schulz. He made something that decries commercialism, ultimately, in favor of a lesson about goodness, when the children get together, decorate Charlie’s sad little tree and dance around it.
Of course, a Herald Bulletin editorial, 9 December 2009, says in one of the great ironies, that year’s airing of the show was edited so ABC could fit in four blocks of advertising, which overcommercialized a show whose theme was overcommercialization.
This brings me to how that tree was transformed from an innocent symbol of something real to a commodity.
According to Squidoo.com’s History of the Christmas Tree, 1950s America saw the advent of the first artificial Christmas trees. This event, it says, was celebrated by Charles M. Schulz’ famous fable about the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Except, his fable didn’t celebrate the artificial tree. While Lucy wanted one, Charlie’s choice of a real tree instead is what is celebrated.
Perhaps the maker’s of this
à are readers of Squidoo.
From the ad text: Want to celebrate the spirit of the Charlie Brown Christmas special? Now you can buy a replica of Charlie Brown’s forlorn little tree that’s machine calibrated to be imperfect.
slowchristmas.org’s review argues: the notion that you can celebrate the spirit of A Charlie Brown Christmas by buying a replica of the imperfect, non-commercial tree that Charlie rescues from the aluminum tree lot is, frankly, nuts. What about buying a cheap knockoff made to mimic the imperfections of the natural world says goodwill toward men and love for the rough majestic beauty of conifers in winter?
But, how did it come to this? According to Leonard Peikoff in Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial, Miami Herald, 23 December 1996, life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate—and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate.
Annie Leonard says, in The Story of Stuff, we seek to meet our emotional and social needs through shopping, a nearly sacred rite in the United States. In fact, in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy President Bush told us to hang out ‘America is open for business’ signs and keep shopping.
Every year, Black Friday to Christmas, we do just that—we shop and we shop. As Christmas shopping season starts earlier and earlier, you can start to see what Art Conrad and Robert Cenedella were getting at. Christmas isn’t about Jesus anymore but about Santa Claus, about buying and getting gifts.
Today, we’ve taken a look at the conception of A Charlie Brown Christmas, we’ve looked at Charlie’s tree and how it turned into this. Finally, we’ve seen why.
The conflict between religion and commercialism goes on. As Joel Waldfogel describes in Scroogenomics: Pope Benedikt XVI chided the increased commercialism surrounding Christmas but Bill O’Reilly and the American Family Association have no quarrel with commercialism in Christmas. Their problem is that religion—Jesus in particular—is absent from the mall.
Godweb.org’s They Tried to Outlaw Christmas suggests that at its best the spirit of Christmas is a mirror in which we see reflected the very best that life can be. We see ourselves moved by generosity, inspired by hope.
We keep coming back to Charlie Brown. Afterall, as Charles Schulz says in Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaels, there will always be a market for innocence in this country… regardless of how far down the capitalist rabbit hole we go—I would add—or perhaps because of it.
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