Vince Guaraldi | "Christmas Time Is Here"

[Deleted]

One of my all-time favorite Christmas songs, from 1965's A Charlie Brown Christmas. Beautiful song. It's been covered countless times.

[HolidayGuy]

A Charlie Brown Christmas is one of my favorite holiday albums. Not only is it great nostalgia, but the music is so soothing. "Linus and Lucy" is one of my favorite pieces of music PERIOD. Also love the vocals for "Christmastime is Here" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing"- so cute, the "lu-lu's" or whatever they're singing. :)

The whole album is pretty much flawless, though.

[Deleted]

#2 on Pitchfork's Top 50 Best Christmas Songs of All Time

Most classic Christmas music dates back to WWII, when the human race seemed doomed for extinction. This is why the most enduring holiday songs come with a cold tendril of dread curling around them—that “I’ll be home for Christmas, but only in my dreams” foreboding, meant to make soldiers stationed abroad weep onto their stationery.

Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmastime Is Here” sounds like crippling depression set amongst cheer, which is why it stands tall in this haunted canon. Whatever your religion or creed, everyone in America walks among the Christmas industrial complex—the gleaming phalanx of stars, tinsel, and boughs of holly dangling from every retail surface and beaming out of every shop window. There is no holiday sentiment more universal than suspecting you should feel more cheerful than you do, fearing that others are huddled in warmth while you stand in the cold. That’s what this children’s choir sighing “snowflakes in the air” tells us, deep in our bones.

“Christmastime Is Here” began its life as a soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, another piece of art that snuck existential dread into our holiday pablum. But that leisurely, blue note-inflected line has transcended its association with the Peanuts gang and become a stand-in for the holiday season’s familiar, reassuring melancholy. We smile while ignoring the tug of loneliness, the pain that reminds us tomorrow won’t be Christmas anymore. Oh, that we could always see such spirit through the year. –Jayson Greene

[areyoureadytojump]

A Charlie Brown Christmas was on tv tonight.

[trustypepper]

Haunting but absolutely beautiful. This never gets old.