In rare cases, five minutes is all it takes to come up with a masterpiece.
At least that’s how long it took for Peanuts producer Lee Mendelson to come up with the indelible lyrics to the holiday classic “Christmastime is Here,” which would go on to become the theme song for the 1965 TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Written by Vince Guaraldi, the jazzy score was originally without lyrics.
“The opening to the show, that waltz, ‘Christmastime is Here,’ was great, but it was a little slow,” Mendelson’s son Jason told People in a new interview. They decided it needed lyrics.
Jason said his father went and called everybody in Los Angeles, asking if anybody could write the lyrics, “and nobody could do it. Nobody responded or could do it.”
“So my dad sat down,” Jason added. “On the back of an envelope, he wrote the rhymes. ‘Christmastime is here, happiness and cheer, fun for all, what the children call their favorite time of year.’ He wrote that out in five minutes.”
Once Mendelson sent the lyrics to Guaraldi, “they went over to the local church, they got the choir to sit down and sing those words,” he said. “And it was done in a rush, with no plan, in an emergency, and that became the lead song for the whole show and has lasted forever… But it was all done on a napkin in five minutes.”
Jason recalled: “Guaraldi wrote, ‘It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful,’ and if you look at the album, it’s on there twice. How many albums have their song twice? There’s the instrumental version and then the lyrical version with the wonderful kids who did the singing.”
A Charlie Brown Christmas was created by Lee, Guaraldi, director Bill Melendez and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz. It first aired in 1965.
The four continued their partnership up until their deaths, Jason said. His father died Christmas Day in 2019, at the age of 86, while Guaraldi died in 1976 at the age of 46; Schulz died in 2000 at 77; and Melendez died at 91 in 2008.
Jason, who, along with his brother, Sean, now produces for Peanuts records, said that whenever “Christmastime is Here” plays, “I hear my father’s voice again.”
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He added that he thinks his father and his collaborators knew the impact Peanuts was going to have — that it “was going to outlive all of them and that they’d left the world that great legacy and piece of art that would continue.”
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