Published December 22, 2018

Charlie Brown Christmas music? Sure! But without Charles Brown, it’s not Christmas. If you don’t know the difference (and even if you do), please read on.

If you grew up in the South in the ’60s or later, chances are you’re already ahead of this post. The programs running in the background in your brain — archives, nostalgia, the type of memory you can’t buy by the megabyte, gigabyte or terabyte — just took over and are retelling a familiar narrative. I hope the feelings it stirs up are mostly good.

Charles Brown wrote “Please Come Home for Christmas” with Gene Redd and performed and released it in 1960. A mostly regional holiday tradition began a year later, when radio stations began playing it in earnest in December.

Know that I cannot be objective about this song. December starts every year for me with George Winston’s album of the same name, and the soundtrack and DVD of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” are annual musts, but the month cannot happen without at least one listen to the first song on my holiday playlist. It is, for me, the Christmas song.

This is Christmas

Yeah, it’s Christmas, my dear

The time of year to be with the one you love”

The title of this blog post comes from early in the first verse and is the heart of the song. It makes me think of the various versions of the quote “The blues ain’t nothin’ but a good man feelin’ bad, thinkin’ ’bout the woman he once was with.” It makes me think about the book “A Bad Woman Feeling Good: Blues and the Women Who Sing Them.” It makes me wonder what we’d hear if the person he is singing about were to sing a song in response. It makes me think about and feel so many shades of blue. I even think about those who don’t celebrate Christmas, and how they can feel alone and left out this time of year. And all of us at one time or another know the blues of missing the one(s) we love. In that sense, the song is universal regardless of geography or beliefs.

This is my second Christmas season as Carly, the first with that as my legal name. It would take a whole series of blog posts to cover all of the blues hues here in what I call second puberty, with estrogen and the holiday season heightening memories of loss and nostalgia for glad and sad news. And because it’s my first December in this phase of hormone replacement therapy, I feel as if I am hearing and feeling so much with new ears and new heartstrings. Hence, this sentimental post at 3 a.m.

Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” is, as they say, often imitated, never duplicated. There are many cover versions. The Eagles released one in 1978 that hit the Billboard top 20. I’ve always suspected that the song was on their radar primarily because Don Henley grew up in northeast Texas (not far from Shreveport, Louisiana, where I once lived) and would have heard Charles Brown’s version every year at Christmastime. A few other versions are OK. But sorry, they’re all fighting for second place.

During my decades in my Louisiana hometown, Lake Charles, you could count on hearing the song on the radio once Thanksgiving was past. When I moved to Shreveport, and then to Baton Rouge, I heard it less often, but visiting my mom gave me chances to hear it, especially on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. A Lake Charles radio station played wall-to-wall Christmas music stretching from one day through the next, and an ad in the newspaper listed the songs in order. One year it dawned on me to record it on a cassette tape. By the internet age, I was able to find and buy Charles Brown’s Christmas album online.

It never occurred to me to order the single or the album from a record store long before that. I think it’s because stumbling upon the song randomly — much like turning on the TV several times in December and finding “It’s a Wonderful Life” on (before NBC bought the rights to it) — was a special gift in its own right. Now, to enjoy either, I can pop in a disc or access a digital version. But nothing beats hearing the song unexpectedly (yay, playlist shuffle!), like a surprise visit from a dear friend.

I imagine it as a small taste of how the singer would feel if she suddenly showed up at his door for Christmas. Or, if not for Christmas, by New Year’s night.

Christmas nostalgia photo by jakkapan/via Shutterstock