Carolyn and I were in a store the other day and they were playing Christmas music. I think it was November 29th which is at least within a month of the holiday. They played some odd arrangement of "Jingle Bell Rock" and they played that Andy Williams recording of "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" and then they played "Linus and Lucy." You know "Linus and Lucy," though perhaps not by name. It's the song that goes something — no, make that exactly like this…
I find it interesting that this is a Christmas song and I'm not saying it isn't. It definitely is. But it's a Christmas song for a different reason than all other Christmas songs. Most Christmas songs are about Christmas for one of three reasons….
- Its lyrics are about Christmas. I mean, if they're singing about Christmas, that makes it a Christmas song, right?
- It's an instrumental but it's such a familiar song that you know and mentally supply the lyrics…and in your head it becomes a Christmas song since those lyrics are, after all, about Christmas.
- It's full of jingle bell sounds.
Simple enough. The unique thing about "Linus and Lucy" is that it's a Christmas song for a reason all its own…
- You recognize it as being in that great TV cartoon, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
That's its sole relevance to Christmas. It reminds you a TV special you love and that special is about Christmas. There's no other connection. You don't know the lyrics because they're aren't any lyrics. There's nothing about the tune that says "Christmas" because it wasn't even written for a Christmas project. Vince Guaraldi wrote the tune for a documentary about Charles Schulz and Peanuts that was done some time before A Charlie Brown Christmas. There are also no jingle bells in it.
This is the only point I wanted to make here about it. I said it on a special feature on one of the DVD releases and I thought it was an intriguing thing so I wanted to mention it here. I make so few wise observations that I have to rerun the ones I do have from time to time.