I Really Can’t Stand “A Charlie Brown Christmas”

An unpopular opinion that needs to be told

When my brother and I were very little and his autism wasn’t diagnosed yet, he had a lot of trouble speaking like a normal human person. At four and five years old, he was still babbling in unintelligible baby-talk half the time, and people couldn’t understand him. Fortunately, at six and seven years old, I was still young enough to mostly understand baby-talk but old enough to speak decent English. I was essentially and unpaid translator for a while.

Here’s my best approximation of a typical lunchtime, circa 1999:

One thing that really helped my brother learn to word correctly was watching movies and parroting back the dialogue of characters he felt drawn to. In this way, we simultaneously developed an uncanny and highly irritating ability to memorize the scripts of films and TV shows we liked and recite them with about 90% accuracy after only one viewing. This is why we can tell you more about The Simpsons than most of American history. Monty Python and The Holy Grail is etched permanently into our brains, and there’s no helping it. We are fully fluent in quotes. It’s how we ended up wired, for better or worse.

For Scott, this was a powerful tool on his journey to proper speech. For me, it was one of the few ways I could communicate and make a genuine connection with my little brother. Sure, I could mostly understand what he was saying, but it wasn’t the same as having a meaningful conversation. He simply didn’t know how to for a long time. Acting out scenes from TV, relying on each other for the verbal and visual cues we knew, didn’t just help two vastly different children learn to communicate effectively — it laid a foundation of unshakeable trust, as the art of acting so often does.

The media we first discovered this ability with was A Charlie Brown Christmas, specifically in Lucy and Linus Van Pelt, and I guess that stands to reason. We very much saw ourselves and our dynamic in them. The older sister, bossy and belligerent, always looking for some sort of drama to be the center of, even if she has…