Thanksgiving with Charlie Brown

When I was a child, the "network holiday special" was a very big deal; each old favorite was an eagerly anticipated, once-a-year opportunity, and the first showing of a new one was greeted with the sort of fanfare elsewhere reserved for the appearance of a new star. Back in that era, before VCRs or DVD-players, before YouTube and on-demand streaming, it was the network's agenda, not yours, and if you were going to watch a holiday special, you plunked yourself down in front of the television (usually with supper on a TV tray) and watched that ephemeral bad-boy in real time or you didn't watch it at all. For my money, anything from Rankin-Bass was king, but immediately below that on the holiday totem pole were the animated Charlie Brown specials.

It was November 1973 and (in the interest of full disclosure) I was seven years old, when A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving aired for the first time. Now, I know critics assert that it wasn't on par with some of its predecessors, particularly the specials devoted to Christmas and Halloween, and yes, they're probably right. For the record, though, it did win an Emmy. It also won an immediate fan in me.

In the story, Charlie Brown's friend Peppermint Patty invites herself and her friends Marcie and Franklin to a Thanksgiving Day feast at Charlie Brown's house. Now, problem number one with this (besides the problem that Peppermint Patty has, let me repeat, decided that Charlie Brown's going to feed her freeloading self and her friends—watch out there, Chuck, that one's a boundary violator!) is that Charlie Brown has to leave home at 4:30 to go to his grandmother's for Thanksgiving. Problem number two is that Charlie Brown is, of course, a little kid, and not a terribly competent one at that, and has no idea how to cook a so much as a frozen pumpkin pie, let alone a turkey and all the trimmings. Nevertheless Charlie Brown, desperate not to appear a failure, enlists the help of Linus and Snoopy, and together the three of them (with kibbutzing from Woodstock the bird) attempt to assemble an unorthodox Thanksgiving feast of buttered white-bread toast, strawberry ice-cream sundaes, pretzels, jelly beans, and popcorn. Zaniness ensues.

Of course, Peppermint Patty (being Peppermint Patty), throws a tantrum over the not-right food, which leads ultimately to a surprisingly perceptive speech from the usually clueless Marcie about the true meaning of Thanksgiving. Then, in a deus ex machina ending, Charlie Brown's grandma invites the whole group to the real Thanksgiving feast at her house, to a general chorus of "Over the River and Through the Wood" from the back of Charlie Brown's parents' station wagon. The End.

Now, I've always had a fair amount of character identification with Charlie Brown, but never more than in this particular story. He's terrified of failure. He worries about disappointing people. He's unable to maintain good boundaries. Story of my life.

And just like Charlie Brown, time and again those traits in me have united to produce overcommitment (with, of course, its usual attendant sense of gradually increasing impending doom, alternating—also of course—with the delusional hope that somehow no one will notice the sub-par, thrown-together nature of my attempts to produce). And also just like Charlie Brown, those same traits have frequently kept me from being forthcoming with people—even those I love—about my situation and my feelings. Cue the inarticulate frustration, the depression and ultimately the isolation and self-exile.

But as Marcie reminds Charlie Brown at the end of the cartoon, it isn't about a perfect production, it's about being grateful—grateful for what you have, and even more, for whom you have—family, friends, loved ones. And what I'm learning, and striving to remember, is that what's true of a Thanksgiving feast is, in that sense, also true of life.

My production is never going to be perfect—most likely, more often than not, it's just going to be a perpetual pile of make- do and ad-hoc-ery: popcorn and pretzels and buttered toast and whatnot, rather than turkey and pie. We manage with what's on hand. But that's not what's important.

What I'm slowly learning in my Charlie-Brown-y-ishness, is that the Christian life isn't about the quality of your production, it's about the quality of your relationships. It's about speaking the truth in love to one another, and working through the irritations and the tantrums and the disappointments. It's about sitting down at the same table together, no matter what's on the table. In the end, after all, if this Christianity stuff is true, the Heavenly Father's going to invite us all to his house for dinner, anyway, and his table, so I hear, has all the trimmings.

Read Gray Matters. Watch that ephemeral bad-boy in real time.