Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales

The special consists of five vignettes, each one starring a different member of the Peanuts gang in various Christmastime situations, largely inspired by original Peanuts comic strips. Snoopy tries to get Lucy to ask him to join her in the skating show, but she's only interested in Schroeder, who rudely rejects her. Later, he dresses up like Santa Claus to work as a bell-ringer to raise money. He is briefly confronted by an angry Rerun, who chastises him for failing to deliver the toys promised to him the previous Christmas. At one point, while dressed as Santa, he plays "Oh! Susanna" on the accordion, which Lucy comments "isn't very Christmasy" as she and Linus walk by. Linus tries to decide what kind of letter he should write to Santa. The next day at school, he meets a girl who repeatedly changes her name (Lydia). When Linus points out that her name of the day, Jezebel, is a hated Old Testament figure who was thrown from a window to her death, the girl changes her name of the day to Susan. Linus tries to ask for her address to send her a Christmas card, and she gives an address that, much to his annoyance, turns out to be fake when the card is returned. Sally decides to give everyone paper airplanes for Christmas and writes her Christmas letter to "Samantha Claus" (her beard being a disguise). After school, a furious Sally blames Charlie Brown for not telling her that she was thinking of Santa Claus. Not knowing how to cut down a Christmas tree, Sally decides to go out and "fall down" a tree: look at it and hope it falls on its own. Her first target turns out to be in the yard of a hostile "ugly kid," who, in disbelief, flippantly tells her she can have the tree if it falls down. Charlie Brown writes a Christmas card to the Little Red-Haired Girl. To Linus's dismay, he writes to her calling himself "your sweet babboo," the phrase Sally has always used to refer to Linus. Charlie points out it's a Brown family expression. Charlie Brown and Sally prepare for Christmas together. Sally thinks she has spotted Santa Claus, but it turns out to be Snoopy in his Santa outfit. She later is haunted by "visions of sugarplums" and is relieved when Charlie Brown tells her they are simply a type of candy. Lucy struggles with being nice and tries to get Schroeder and Linus to buy her presents, at one point trying to justify it by claiming that because the Bible has the word "sister" in it, it means Linus must buy her a Christmas present.