A Charlie Brown Christmas

“I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It’s not bad at all, really. Maybe it just needs a little love.”

Like families all over Wisconsin, we celebrated Christmas yesterday with prayer, presents, plenty of good food and a charming reenactment of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Directed by Molly and starring her grandmother Mary Jane as Lucy, her brother Charlie in the title role, and her godfather and host Steve as Linus, our little play blossomed like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree thanks to age-old family traits like wit, humor and love.

Witness Wilson, our sly Snoopy, trailed obediently by his first-grade cousin Sam, a perfectly sweet Woodstock. A Christmas cold gave our Sally (Molly’s sister Katherine) an excellent gravelly voice and a keen sense of style and comedic timing made Molly’s godmother Nancy the ideal choice for Violet.

Schroeder played the air-piano because we forgot a key prop and most of the actors relied on a script that was edited for length (except for Katherine, who arrived off-script with a variety of Sally voices to accent her seven lines.) Pigpen forgot to come on stage for the all-cast rendition of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and Peppermint Patty, doubling as the play’s photographer, broke the cardinal rule of theatre and nearly blinded fellow cast members by snapping flash photos throughout the production.

But when Linus delivered his soliloquy on the true meaning of Christmas to an appreciative (and, frankly, captive) audience scattered throughout the basement theatre and skyped in from the west coast, we all considered the message received:

“…and on earth peace, good will toward men.”