a charlie brown christmas

From one of the best websites on the net — Pitchfork — comes a short history of the now famous A Charlie Brown Christmas television special, originally aired on CBS in December of 1965 with, according to writer Ron Hart, “a surprising amount of controversy.”   

Hart writes that “much of the crew fretted over the quality of the product, which was completed just 10 days shy of its air date. [Director Bill] Melendez was said to be embarrassed of the final cut, while executives fretted over the cartoon’s darker themes of depression, anxiety, alienation, secularism and, perhaps above all,