Roots of wintertime celebrations and holidays

There’s a lot of Christmas music I’m not so fond of – the kind of kitschy, “Santa Baby”-ish stuff on repeat every December. But other songs, both secular and sacred, I’d happily play nonstop from Black Friday to New Year’s Eve. And near the top of the list is Vince Guaraldi’s 1965 soundtrack to “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

A jazz pianist was an odd choice, perhaps, to score a children’s animated holiday special. And it wasn’t the only decision “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz and his team made that caused producers to raise their eyebrows.

“CBS executives thought the 25-minute program was too slow, too serious and too different,” explains Stephen Lind, an associate professor at the University of Southern California who’s written a book about Schulz’s spirituality. “A cartoon about a depressed kid seeking psychiatric advice? No laugh track? Humble, lo-fi animation? And was that a Bible verse? It seemed destined to fail – if not scrapped outright.”

It did not fail. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” has endured for more than 50 years – “not because it was flashy or followed the rules,” Lind writes, “but because it was sincere.”