Christmas Time is Here
The Vince Guaraldi trio and my long ago, analog life
Quick: what’s your favorite Christmas album?
There’s a right answer to this question: It’s A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio.
If that’s not your answer, then I’m sorry. But I can assume nonetheless that you know it, because of course you do, because everyone does: the score is ubiquitous this time of year, piped through every store’s sound system. It’s one of our first listens when it comes to Christmas music, played while we’re washing up Thanksgiving.
For the longest time, this soundtrack has simply been, for me, something in our Christmas music mix. But this year it’s struck me differently. I’ve been trying to figure out why.
I’m no music expert, and I’m certainly no expert on jazz, but I don’t think I’m bold to claim that the musicianship here is impeccable. They’re a simple trio: piano, bass, and drum, accompanied often enough on this album by a chorus of children.
I’m impressed, in part, by the way the music matches the scenes it underscores. Take, for instance, the brilliance— by which I mean light, not genius— of “Skating.” Here’s the famous scene in which the children make their way around the ice, bested in skill by Snoopy, who glides past and around them all. The music here is upbeat, piano and drum kit popping, all of it an aural echo of a winter day lit up by sun.
And there’s “Christmas is Coming,” another famous scene, in which the children, gathered (presumably) in some local community center to rehearse for the Christmas pageant, can’t for the life of them stop dancing. Charlie Brown is beside himself to bring them under control, but you can hardly blame them: who could resist dancing to this jazzy, bouncing score?
“My Little Drum” is bright, too: simple percussion augmented by children’s voices singing the part of the drum: “barrabarum barrabarum barrabarumpbumpbum.” Remember?
Everyone listening knows that the children singing are, in fact, real children. “Christmas time is here,” they sing, not all of them reaching the first note in “Christmas.” The chorus of “lulus” in “Hark the Herald” is likewise uneven. Notes break, pitches falter. The union of their voices isn’t quite united.
I relish that imperfection.
The recording itself likewise has an unvarnished quality. I doubt I’ve ever heard it from a real record on an actual record player, but— even on CD, even from Spotify— the entire album has what I can only describe as texture, a lovely and far distant cry from something polished by autotune.
And even with the jazzier, upbeat songs, the album’s pace is consistently mellow, matching the scenes: Charlie Brown and Linus leaning against a wall; Charlie Brown and Linus walking to the tree lot. There’s no hurry here, no quick camera cuts, no puncturing sound bite.
Maybe I just miss television like this.
But I think what I miss is the snow. The Christmastime world of the Peanuts is hemmed and padded in snow.
I live in North Carolina and have done for thirty years now. We’ve had snow a time or two (or ten). But mostly we don’t.
I grew up in Pittsburgh. Sometimes when it snowed at night, we’d turn off the lights inside the house, turn on the light outside the back door, and then just watch the snow fall. I remember lying in my bed at night, listening to the chains on the wheels of the snow plows, hearing them scrape the snow into mounds along the side of the road. Hoping against hope that we’d have a snow day tomorrow, or at the very least a two hour delay.
I miss snow and its pure enjoyment and the absence of feeling that I’m missing snow because I’ve done something wrong in the way of carbon emissions.
Have you ever noticed how the Vince Guaraldi trio evokes a sense of snow? As I said, I don’t know much at all about jazz, but I’ve noticed and now listen for the use of the brush on the drum. To my ear, that sound is snow’s musical equivalent.
I know, I know— and of course you’re right: snow makes no sound. But one of my literature professors once said (of snow in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”) that snow has an audible silence.
I think it’s true. The Vince Guaraldi trio helps me hear it.
And they make me think of my childhood. I don’t have to be watching the show to see the story unfold: Lucy at her makeshift psychiatrist desk. Sally writing a letter to Santa Claus. Snoopy making an elaborate Christmas display of his dog house and Charlie Brown’s angst that he’d “gone commercial.” Characters who were, for a time, as vivid to me as the kids I grew up with.
We waited for the bus together on winter mornings, standing in the cold until our jeans froze stiff behind our knees. We sledded together down the hill behind my house. In the spring, sometimes I’d climb that hill to play kickball or whiffleball in the neighboring cul-de-sac. And on late summer nights, sometimes we’d stay out late to play ghost in the graveyard.
Already, at eight, nine, ten years old, the soundtrack to the Charlie Brown Christmas special was something I knew. Hearing it now, during Advent 2024, the Vince Guaraldi trio has the power to take me back to pretty much any place in my history, because they were there, too.
Afficionados of all varieties have a great term: “deep cut.” Coined in 1993, the phrase originally referred (and still refers) to a song that, compared with other songs on an album, is less known or popular. It carries the idea that one must really be a fan of the album or artist in order to know the song: if you know a deep cut, you’ve listened to and know the whole thing, not just the stuff everybody listens to.
But my daughter uses it in reference to memory.
“Oh, that’s a deep cut,” she’ll say. She might be speaking of a song, but in this instance, it’s one she hasn’t heard in forever but, once upon a time, heard all the time. Or it’s pictures we haven’t come across in ages. Or an event one of us recalls that she’d otherwise forgotten.
A memory of something loved and lost that comes from the far reaches: this is what Emma calls a deep cut.
A deep cut for me— on Emma’s terms— is the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I knew the soundtrack before I’d heard of a soundtrack. I didn’t know the music existed any more than I knew I existed, if that makes sense. We both simply were.
One more observation about this album: for all its jazzy and bright moments, it has, overall, a tenderness to it. This serves, I think, as a buffer against the children’s cruelty in the story. And it helps make believable their transformation at the end.
Not a bad, in the way of a deep cut, to carry with you for the rest of your life.
I hope you’re enjoying your favorite Christmas music these days.
With joy,
Rebecca
Oh, but snow DOES have a sound after the audible silence of its falling. Anyone who has walked on a wet snowfall will remind you of the glorious muted and squeaky crunch it makes under your feet.
IF it happens to snow here, I pull up this album and hit play, because it absolutely evokes a sense of snow. On my recent trip we got snow on a day when none was in the forecast, and all the friends fully believe it was God’s kind gift to us Southern girls who long for snow but so rarely get it these days.