Parents deliver the message
The scenery had been painted and the lines rehearsed, and all was set for a production of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” at a Johnson County elementary school in Paintsville, Ky., Thursday. All except one aspect, the segment in which Linus van Pelt answers Charlie Brown’s question about whether there was anybody who knew what Christmas was all about. That – the entire minute on which the play is based (and which was included in cartoonist Charles Schulz’s original 1965 television special) – was gone.
The segment, of course, was the recitation by Linus of Luke 2:8-14, which tells of the birth of Jesus Christ and is where the day and the season get their names.
Radio talk show host Glenn Beck, hearing of the planned excision of the biblical text, suggested parents stand up and recite the text themselves.
“I would get together with parents and I would – if I knew this was coming,” he said, “take the script of what Linus actually says, and I would stand up as a block of parents and just stop the show and just all of us at that point, ‘Doesn’t anybody know what Christmas is all about?’ And all of the parents stand up and just start saying it, even as the play is going on.”