Michael Eriksson
A Swede in Germany
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Peanuts for Christmas

A common U.S. Christmas tradition that I have never quite understood is “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. Even as a child, I was more bored than entertained by both it and one or two other “Peanuts” movies that came my way—the strip is so much better. (And compared to the Swedish Christmas staple of “From All of Us to All of You”, one of the most brilliant things that Disney ever made, there is no comparison.)

However, the date being 2024-12-23, I was looking through some Christmas-related material and found a booklet titled “Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking”. It was a quick read, but I found myself pondering both things Christmas and things “Peanuts”. A few, incomplete, comments:

  1. While Schulz, himself, appears to have hated the name “Peanuts”, I find it brilliant. Here we have these little people, living in their own world, trying to find their way, having their own concerns, hopes, and dreams, whatnot—while being peanuts to the rest of the world. In this, the name catches so much of what childhood is all about. This the more so, as the strip is not just child-centric and told from the children’s point of view, but has a near absence of adults, except as the occasional “off screen” speaker.


    Side-note:

    Contrast this with e.g. “Calvin and Hobbes”, which was both child-centric and told from a child’s (usually, singular) point of view, but which had a much greater involvement of adults and showed adults “on screen” quite often.

    With both “Peanuts” and “Calvin and Hobbes”, note that this does not necessarily imply that the respective strip was intended mainly (let alone, solely) for children. On the contrary, some parts might be best appreciated by an adult with a few decades of experience beyond that of a reading child. The humor, meanwhile, knows no age restrictions.

    (In the original version of this page, I spoke of a “nostalgic adult”. While this formulation gives a true statement, especially for “Calvin and Hobbes”, it might have given the wrong impression, because the point of the adult looking back, above, is not nostalgia for a past childhood but an adult’s perspective. The perspective is needed; the nostalgia is not.)



    Side-note:

    Growing up in Sweden, however, I knew the strip as “Snobben”: The dog had been “translated” from “Snoopy” to “Snobben” and the entire strip had been named after the dog. While Snoopy was a breakout character, this did miss the charm and implications of “Peanuts”.

    It also implicitly shoved Charlie Brown into the background—up to and including that “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was renamed to have a Snoopy-centric name. (What name I once encountered, I do not remember. A quick Internet search revealed a “Good Jul, Snobben”, i.e. “Merry Christmas, Snoopy”, but this seems to be from a 1998 dubbing, well past my encounter(s). Even so, this illustrates the shove well.)


  2. In a next step, Christmas is in many ways the most child-centric time of the year, the most magical to children, and the time best enjoyed from a child’s perspective. This certainly in its secular aspects; however, to some degree even in its religious aspects. If in doubt, the center of the religious take is on the birth of Jesus and the events of his earliest life.

    However, here we also see a clear division in how children and adults view the world and treat each other. For instance, all too many children, and into all too high ages, fail to understand how much a typical parent puts into the children’s happiness—something that might find no better illustration than Christmas, where the adults work hard to have the children see a Christmas tree, presents, food, and whatnot, appear as if by magic. (Or, for presents, as if delivered by Santa. Cf. below.) Likewise, if we look at a few “Peanuts” strips, we find children in clothes, we find houses with four walls and a roof, we find electricity and water, whatnot—but we do not find concerns about, say, how to pay a bill or a mortgage. (With reservations for what I might fail to remember and the many, many individual strips that I have never read.)

  3. But then we have the complication that being or not being a peanut is something relative. For instance, a great many of the problems in today’s world and, especially, during the COVID-countermeasure era, go back exactly to the random citizen being viewed as a peanut by politicians and members of a pseudo-elite. (Going by historical records, also a great many of the problems in past times, but there I cannot speak from personal experience.)

    Likewise, individual customers vs. big business. Indeed, in Germany, the English word “peanuts” might be less associated with Charlie Brown et al. and more with Deutsche Bank, the largest bank in Germany. An amount of 50 million DM in accumulated open bills, owed to various small businesses, in a bankruptcy proceeding had been dismissed as “peanuts” by the bank, to the great annoyance of those unpaid. The result was great controversy in media, a repeated use of “peanuts” as a slogan to denigrate the bank after later missteps, and an actual grass-roots advertising campaign against Deutsche Bank based on the word “peanuts”.

    Here, however, we see a stark contrast between the peanuts of Schulz and the more adult peanuts. Children are in so far problematic that they do not understand the world or the sacrifices that their parents make, cannot fend for themselves, etc. With more adult constellations, it is more often the other way around, in that e.g. politicians are kept in money at the cost of the adult tax-payers, that they fail to understand the complications that the man on the street faces (well illustrated by the Democrat debacle in the 2024 U.S. elections), that they do more harm than good to the citizens through various mechanisms (including a weakening of economic growth and, in recent years, politician-created inflation), etc. Indeed, I have in the past likened politics to a Santa-like scam: Adults pay for gifts to the children and Santa is given credit—likewise, the tax-payers pay for this-and-that and the politicians actively take credit.

  4. A particular point of “Charlie Brown’s Christmas Stocking” was a deplorable lack of fire places to hang stockings. This does raise an important question: What if Santa actually is real and the true reason that adults have to buy presents is a lack of fire places?

    While the question might seem like (and, in the specific details, is) a joke, there is a more serious side to it: One of the biggest reasons why an adult would not believe in Santa is the absence of gifts that spontaneously appear, sightings of (a not obviously fake to an adult) Santa, a lack of sleighs flying through the sky, etc. However, much of that could simply be explained by a combination of a lack of fire places resp. associated chimneys and a Santa who insists on that type of entryway or, say, only gives gifts through stockings hanging on fire places.

    With Santa, we do have a control group of sorts, in that the same type of “absence of proof” (likely—I have not actually verified this) occurs even in houses that do have chimneys and fire places. In many other cases, we might well be jumping to conclusions. For instance, I once noted the odd lack of mosquitoes in my adult life, while they had been so common during my childhood. However, as I soon convinced myself, this was not a matter of mosquitoes dying out—instead, it was a matter of environment (a metaphorical lack of fire places): The childhood days of mosquitoes took place on the country side and at short distances from both woods and water. My adult observation took place in the middle of a modern city (Stockholm).

    The same idea applies over a wide range of other cases, including in politics, and it is important to keep in mind that “absence of proof” can result not just from actual absence (Santa is not real) but also be a sign that something is prevented from occurring (Santa cannot gain entry); that proof is artificially removed (parents replace that cookie and glass of milk to hide that they had been eaten resp. drunk by Santa); that proof is distorted or misrepresented, possibly, to the point of appearing as proof of the opposite (parents want to take credit for Santa’s work and attach cards with “From [Mommy/Daddy] to [child’s name]” on various Santa-delivered presents); etc.

    For instance, we often have politicians complaining about “market failures”, while these “market failures” often go back to an absence of market forces (fire places), because the politicians already have meddled too much. How is the “invisible hand” (Santa) supposed to work when market forces have been sabotaged (fireplaces torn out, bricked up, whatnot)?

    For instance, I have seen Leftist nits reject market-friendly policies as the cause of the German “Wirtschaftswunder” in favor of the Marshall plan—and, absurdly, use the Wirtschaftswunder as a reason to call for greater government intervention. (Attaching fake cards to distort credit.)


    Side-note:

    With similar mechanisms also applying in reverse, but in a poorer match with the Santa analogy, e.g. in that politicians first cause inflation and then try to blame “price gouging” or “greedy capitalists”, instead of taking responsibility for their own actions.



    Side-note:

    I am an Atheist, but a Christian might find a more religious take on this Christmas-centric analogy satisfying—that the dearth of religion and whatnot is less a matter of the absence of Jesus and more a matter of human hearts with a lack of entry points for him.