Snoopy our Hero? I think not

Opinion by Chris Lippiatt

I have had a decades long relationship of hate with the beloved Christmas song Snoopy’s Christmas.

Now before you tar and feather me and tell me how it was your grandma’s favorite Christmas song, or inform me that the festive season only begins once it has played on the radio. Just hear me out.

It all started in the 1980s when I was four.  I was asking what everybody’s favorite Christmas song was and my Grandma said ‘Snoopy’s Christmas’.  My brain exploded.  They made a song about Charlie Brown’s pet dog?  I hounded my grandma (pardon the pun) to let me listen to it, so she arrived one day with a Music World vinyl record of the song, complete with a copyright infringing drawing of the dog Snoopy on the cover.  

Eagerly, I listened to it and over the next three minutes and ten seconds my tiny, tiny, boy child heart was crushed by a military ballad that had no mention of the Peanuts characters at all.  I was lied to by a Christmas song.  I folded my arms and proceeded to hate Snoopy’s Christmas for the next two decades or so.

Then I grew up and decided to give it anther chance.  I listened to this ballad of a brave and noble allied pilot in World War One, fighting a sinister enemy and overcoming crippling odds to gallantly let his enemy live because Christmas. Or so I thought… But that’s not what happened.

They call Snoopy the hero but he does nothing heroic. The Red Baron is flying on Christmas Eve and the Allied Command ‘ignore all of their men and call on Snoopy to do it again’.  They could have sent a squadron, or listened to the men, but no, they wanted to handle this like a Chuck Norris film.  

Snoopy’s not even that good of a pilot, getting iced wings and caught in the Red Barons sights pretty quickly. The song suggests that he didn’t shoot because of the bells below. BUT, he was in a biplane deafened by the sound of engines and wind rushing past his face and wearing one of those leather helmets that cover the ears, which I don’t think will do much to protect him in a crash.  There is zero chance he would hear those bells.

The Red Baron forces Snoopy to land behind enemy lines, says Merry Christmas, offers him a toast, complete with cork popping sound, and lets him go.  It kind of seems like the Red Baron had planned this all along.  Unless, of course, he keeps a bottle of bubbles in his plane for emergency special occasions.

It doesn’t add up. I did a little detective work and here’s the real story.
It’s Christmas eve and the Red Baron decides, in the spirit of the season, to invite his arch enemy for Christmas. He flies around to attract Snoopy to come out to kill him. Outmaneuvers the Allies’ best pilot, forces him to land and wishes him a Merry Christmas.

He could have captured or killed his mortal enemy. But no.

He humbly lets the man who minutes before was trying to murder him go free because it’s Christmas.  And somehow he is the villain of the song.

So yes, I still don’t like the song. But not for the misleading use of a cartoon dog.

I don’t like it because it’s about a man who tried to kill someone who was just wanting to wish him a Merry Christmas and somehow he is still the good guy.

Could you imagine that in a modern setting? Going out on Christmas Eve to be kind to someone you don’t get along with and they come out with a gun and try to shoot you?

You wrestle the gun out of their hands, calm them down, wish them a Merry Christmas, give them their gun back and let them go. Then you turn on the radio to hear that someone wrote a song about the event and for some reason you’re the bad guy in all this?

If there are any songsmiths out there, lets work on the Red Baron’s Christmas song to teach us the importance of being nice to everyone, even the murderous jerks.