You’re a Merry Man, Charlie Brown
The 50-year-old Christmas TV tradition endures because Chuck knows the reason for the season.
By 
STEPHEN LIND
Dec. 20, 2015 4:11 p.m. ET
Every year millions tune in to “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” a 50-year-old TV special that shows its age. The animation looks rudimentary by Pixar standards. The voice acting, performed by real children, isn’t exactly a Shakespearean triumph. So what makes this “Peanuts” television special, in a word, special? It’s that Charlie Brown knows what Christmas is all about.

The creator of “Peanuts,” Charles Schulz, was surprised by the opportunity to make a TV special at all. In 1963 San Francisco producer Lee Mendelson made a documentary about Schulz’s cartooning, but it failed to sell. Two years later, however, advertising giant McCann Erickson called Mr. Mendelson, inquiring about the possibility of an animated Christmas program for its client, Coca-Cola.

In a mere handful of months, Schulz, Mr. Mendelson and director Bill Melendez pulled the show together. To elevate it to fit the paradoxical sophistication of “Peanuts,” they scrapped the traditional laugh track and opted for a jazz score. To maintain the strip’s ethos of authenticity, they had children voice the characters and brought in a choir from a local church. Schulz insisted that they include a passage of scripture—Linus’s recitation of the Gospel of Luke. When his creative partners voiced concern that broaching religion might be risky, Schulz responded simply: “If we don’t do it, who will?”
The trio showed their completed reel to CBS network executives just shy of the scheduled airdate. The execs hated it. “The Bible thing scares us,” they said, as Mr. Mendelson later recalled. They complained about the music and plodding animation. Lucky for Chuck, it was too late to change the programming schedule.

The show was met with wild adoration. More than 15 million viewers tuned in, and it won an Emmy for children’s programming in 1966, beating out Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color.” Many of those who sent letters to Schulz and Coca-Cola said that the Biblical content, rare on television even then, resonated. “I am encouraged,” one read, “to see a national company willing to sponsor not only an excellent production but also a Christian one.”

Re-aired every year since—more than any Christmas special save “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which debuted a year earlier—the show pushed Schulz’s strip to fresh heights. CBS ordered more specials, including a Halloween tale that also still runs. The shows became an entry point as the changing newspaper industry strove to bring new readers to its funny pages. They drove the “Peanuts” licensing operation, now owned 80% by New York-based Iconix and 20% by the Schulz family.

Half a century later, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is far more than a quaint historical artifact. The slow and yet sublime story proves that purposeful characters and a simple aesthetic can beat fancy computer algorithms. The annual spiritual validation on mainstream television is a breath of fresh air. Free from gross humor or double-entendres, the show is a reminder that Hollywood need not reach to the lowest common denominator. A lonely kid who hears deep truths and is comforted by flawed but well-meaning friends is enough.
​
In the first of this year’s two broadcasts, seven million viewers tuned in to see old Chuck struggle with the meaning of the season. It is a struggle, at once simple and complex, that the studios thought would result in failure. The viewers continue to say otherwise.
Mr. Lind is the author of “A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz” (University Press of Mississippi, 2015).

Syrian war makes sudden appearance at convent in historic Christian town

By Liz Sly, Published: September 9

BEIRUT — High in the mountains above Damascus lies a town so remote that Syria’s war had passed it by, so untouched by time that its inhabitants still speak the language of Jesus.

The violence ravaging the rest of Syria has finally caught up with Maaloula, renowned as the oldest Christian community in the world — and the last in which the same version of Aramaic that prevailed 2,000 years ago is the native tongue.

On Sunday, Syrian rebels, including some affiliated with al-Qaeda, swept through Maaloula for the second time in four days, after an assault a few days earlier in which the last of its few thousand residents fled and the specter of unchecked violence threatened to convulse the iconic town.

Only a couple of dozen nuns remained, cowering in fear as warplanes screeched overhead, shells exploded and al-Qaeda-linked fighters overran their convent, turning them into witnesses to what may be one of the more extraordinary encounters of the Syrian war.

The monks had fled from their nearby monastery months ago, and even the last two priests who oversaw the affairs of Maaloula’s ancient Mar Takla nunnery took buses out of town last week, leaving the nuns of Maaloula to fend for themselves as the fighters closed in.

With Congress poised to debate President Obama’s proposed military intervention in Syria, the arrival of war in Maaloula illuminates the complexity of a conflict that has defied all attempts at resolution for 21 / 2 years. The future of Christianity in the region of its birth is just one of the smaller issues at stake in the discussions expected to unfold.

The fight for Maaloula began Wednesday, when rebels of the Free Syrian Army launched an assault aided by a suicide bomber from Jabhat al-Nusra, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government because of its declared affiliation with al-Qaeda.

The bomber, said by other fighters to be a Jordanian, blew himself up at the Syrian army checkpoint commanding entrance to the town, killing seven government loyalists. Other rebel units, most of them less extremist, swarmed into the town, which in past years lured Christian pilgrims from around the world to explore its ancient sites and listen to the Christian liturgy preached in Aramaic in its churches.

Firing volleys of gunfire into the air, according to videos posted on YouTube, the rebels roamed through the town in pickup trucks and said they had “cleansed” Maaloula of supporters of the regime.

They also vowed not to attack Christians and proclaimed, “We must not harm any church . . . we target only those who shoot at us,” a commander told the camera. “These people are our families . . . these icons of the church and those people here and there, they should stay in peace.”

And then they departed Friday, almost as abruptly as they had arrived. They attacked the town, several rebel spokesmen said, only as part of an offensive to secure control of a major road between the strategically vital city of Homs and the capital, Damascus, both at the forefront of the broader battle for control of Syria — a battle that has been waged by the family of President Bashar al-Assad for 40 years.

But when the rebels moved in, the elders of the town “were afraid of airstrikes and shelling,” said Abu Shamso, an activist with the rebels, speaking by Skype from a nearby opposition-controlled village in the mountains northwest of Damascus.

“They wanted us to go, so we left,” he said.

Overnight Saturday, the rebels surged back into the town, including members of Jabhat al-Nusra. They surrounded the Mar Takla convent, which was built into mountains where persecuted early Christians found sanctuary many centuries ago.

The 27 nuns and the two dozen or so orphans they are caring for remained inside, huddled in an ancient cavern known as the Christmas Cave because it resembles the caves in Bethlehem where Jesus was born, said the convent’s mother superior, Pelagia Sayaf, who was interviewed by telephone and has been in charge of the nunnery since 1990.

The cave also offered protection from the MIG fighter jets that began dropping bombs on the town to dislodge the rebels and the shelling that routinely targets towns across the country that are seized by rebels.

Late Sunday, the Jabhat al-Nusra fighters entered the convent and asked the nuns to appear in a video to declare that they had not been harmed. Such videos serve as the chief medium of communication for all parties to the Syrian opposition.

There were 25 fighters in all, Sayaf said. The one who negotiated with her spoke with a Saudi accent, while others appeared to be from Afghanistan or Chechnya, she said. Several spoke no Arabic, and all of her comments were interpreted from Arabic into English by one of the fighters to the others, she said, leading her to suspect that some were Americans.

In the video, she told the fighters that she had not been harmed, which, she said, is true.

And then, she said, the fighters withdrew from the convent. The nuns remain, praying and expressing no opinions about their hopes for the outcome of a war that could soon engulf the town.

“If you had heard so many explosions in any other place on Earth, many people would be dead,” Sayaf said. “It is because of our faith that we are alive.”

And, she added, “Maaloula is a very special place.”



Suzie Haidamous and Ahmed Ramadan contributed to this report.

By Hamil R. Harris

For nearly 50 years, Robert B. Grogan has ignored howling winds and frigid temperatures to climb hundreds of steps up into the tower of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and manually play, with his fists and his feet, 56 carillon bells, as he will do after Tuesday’s noon choral Mass for Christmas.

Whether it has been to celebrate the arrivals of Pope John Paul or Pope Benedict, or to remember the 26 children and adults who died Dec. 14 in the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., or to entertain the faithful arriving Monday on Christmas Eve for midnight Mass, Grogan has never missed a major event as the basilica’s carillonneur.

There are other bells in the tower that can be played electronically from below, but not the bronze carillons.

“You can’t play with your fingers on the carillon keyboard because the bell action is too heavy,” said Grogan, 73, a resident of Silver Spring, who donned an overcoat Monday as he climbed 208 steps up a spiral staircase to the “playing cabin.” He’s been making the winding ascent since 1964.

For 34 years, he was also the organist at the basilica, but he retired from that post in 2008. (He still plays organ at Masses during the week and teaches organ in the music department at Catholic University.)

“What I do is rather unique, and I enjoy it for its musical and spiritual interest,” said Grogan, explaining that an hour of “really athletic” music on the carillons can be draining.

“When I say I am a carillonneur, most people might think that it is an electronic instrument with loudspeakers in the tower, but what you have here is very physical,” Grogan said. “To chime the bells requires sounds made from a wooden keyboard with levers for the hands and feet, and the loudest of the sound depends on how hard I strike the lever.”

There are two chambers for the carillons, one at 172 feet and the other at 223 feet above the ground. Grogan’s frigid playing cabin sits at 200 feet. To get there, he must take an elevator to the sixth floor of the bell tower, walk up a ladder and climb through a trap door before he even reaches the spiral staircase.

The largest of the carillons, called the Virgin Mary, weighs 31 / 2 tons. The basilica’s carillons were cast in Annecy, France, shortly before they were installed in 1963. For carillon aficionados, the basilica’s French bells sound different from the National Cathedral’s English carillons and Arlington National Cemetery’s Dutch set.

Grogan, who learned how to play the bells as a music major at the University of Kansas, can certainly hear the difference. He’s stayed at the basilica all these years because he loves the bells, and he enjoys the variety of his other musical vocations, be it playing organ now for weekday Masses or teaching organ at the university.

There’s a familiarity to the Christmas season, and yet there are events he can never anticipate. Grogan fought back tears last week after he sounded the 31 / 2-ton Virgin Mary 26 times for the children and adults killed in Newtown. “As a grandfather with seven grandchildren,” Grogan said, “I thought about what an ordeal these people went through, and this horrible event.”

Tuesday’s Christmas carols will be joyous — and not too difficult. With his overcoat on, he’ll hardly break a sweat.

I remember very clearly what would nowadays be called my spiritual awakening, the moment when faith became something personal to me. Until that day, I had been an extremely lucky child. I had a loving family and a comfortable life, and my father was a successful lawyer.

When I was 10, my father, just 40, suffered a severe stroke and was rushed to the hospital. The doctors were uncertain if he would survive. My mother, trying to keep a sense of normality for her children, sent us to school that morning.

To provide comfort to a frightened and bewildered boy, the head teacher, who was ordained, suggested that he and I kneel and pray for my father's recovery. I knew this was not as straightforward as he thought, and I plucked up the courage to whisper, "I'm afraid my father doesn't believe in God."

My teacher's reply was to make a lasting impression on me. "That doesn't matter," the man said. "God believes in him. He loves him without demanding or needing love in return."

My father ended up making a good recovery after a long rehabilitation. Nearly 50 years later, he remains an atheist. And while I did not become a fully committed and practicing Christian overnight, that conversation with my teacher started the process in which I came to recognize that there is a purpose to our existence beyond ourselves.

I was confirmed while I was at college, and faith has been a constant in my life. Yet even for nonbelievers, faith cannot be ignored. Today, religious beliefs -- whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or other creeds -- are at the core of the lives of two-thirds of the world's population, giving them sense and direction. And it is not only a matter of numbers -- faith matters because it inspires people to act and raise their sights beyond themselves.

Sadly, religion can be distorted into violent extremism. Having spiritual beliefs has never rendered a person incapable of doing wrong or evil. But far more often, faith can be a force for good. I have witnessed its positive impact wherever I've gone in the world. I've seen it at major disasters in the incredible humanitarian efforts of the Red Cross, Islamic Relief, or World Jewish Relief, all organizations inspired by belief. I've also seen it in the central role of synagogues, churches, temples, and mosques in helping the poor, vulnerable, and disadvantaged in every country. In every case, men and women of faith who are trying to put the idea of unconditional love into practice are leading these efforts.

We should not allow those who use religion as a divisive force to succeed. We can harness its power and common values to bring us together. This is more important than ever in an age when the Internet, mass communication, and travel are shrinking the world.

None of this means giving up our own beliefs -- I always say that no matter the company, I remain a Christian. But it does require focusing on the vast areas we share and not on the much smaller areas that separate us. Two years ago, I launched the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Among our projects, we've connected students from different continents and religions to help them learn from one another. We've united faith communities to fight against malaria, a disease that kills one million people a year. And we recently held a competition in which young people around the world created short films that showed what their religious beliefs mean to them. 

That idea of unconditional love, which made such an impression on a frightened young boy so long ago, is at the core of all our great faiths. We need to get back to this guiding light. By understanding one another, respecting one another, and acting with one another, we can show why humanity is made not poorer by faith but immeasurably richer. 




Tony Blair, who served as Britain's prime minister from 1997 to 2007, is the author of the new memoir "A Journey: My Political Life." To read more about his work, go to tonyblairfaithfoundation.org.