A Moody Masterpiece
Anyone who’s ever been a kid knows that a big part of coming to grips with the world is having your wishes collide with reality. Maybe it’s the usual list of casualties: Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, even the slow disintegration of your imaginary friend. Maybe your parents were more literary in their fancies and populated the woods behind your house with goblins, faeries, and elves. Or maybe your heart conjured up a giant pumpkin that showers gifts on the virtuous kid in the sincerest pumpkin patch in the neighborhood.
Like its predecessor, A Charlie Brown Christmas, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown features the voices of actual children. And they don’t sound like showbiz kids with over-ambitious parents nipping at their heels, either. They speak in the halting cadences of an actual child. Narrating Snoopy’s adventures as a World War I flying ace, Peter Robbins, the voice of Charlie Brown, takes the sentence “Making his way across the French countryside” and butchers it into “Making his way across. The French countryside.” It’s glorious. Polished delivery from children sounds about as real as a Stepford wife.
From the start, The Great Pumpkin announces itself as a distinctly moody and even impressionistic cartoon. In the opening, Linus and Lucy trudge through a mess of fallen leaves to a pumpkin patch. Linus rolls the pumpkin home as they make their way against the backdrop of a startling magenta sky with shades of deep purple. Preparing to carve a jack-o’-lantern, Lucy brandishes a large kitchen knife and cuts a neat hole in the top of the pumpkin. Alarmed, Linus yells, “Oh, you didn’t tell me you were gonna kill it!” This macabre outburst is followed by a credit sequence featuring a ghoulish ensemble of Halloween creatures.
What’s the harm in a young kid believing in the Great Pumpkin?
Then there’s Vince Guaraldi’s glorious score. The flute plays a prominent role in most of the pieces, giving the songs a fluttering, spectral quality befitting of a season filled with ghosts and falling leaves. “The Great Pumpkin Waltz” stands as one of Guaraldi’s most graceful and serene compositions.
The Joys of Wishful Thinking
The Great Pumpkin has the dubious honor of making an appearance in a work of analytic philosophy. Alvin Plantinga points to Linus as an example of sincerity exceeding good sense. Linus’s religious epistemology regarding the Great Pumpkin’s existence is quite simple: “Everyone tells me you are a fake, but I believe in you. P.S., if you really are a fake, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
Linus’s peers share Plantinga’s criticism. “You must be crazy. When are you going to stop believing in something that isn’t true?” intones Charlie Brown. To which Linus says, “When you stop believing in that fellow with the red suit and the white beard who goes, ‘Ho ho ho!’” Brown wryly responds, “We are obviously separated by denominational differences.” Lucy, who fears that her little brother’s eccentric faith will damage her sterling reputation, is even more uncompromising: “Knock it off or I’ll pound you!” Linus is right about the double standard here. In a letter to the Great Pumpkin, he reasonably points out that the gourd’s credibility problem is really just a matter of publicity. Santa gets all the press.
One of the many symptoms of the modern world is a near-sadistic relish in dashing the hopes and dreams of kids. My younger sister and I are both great animal lovers who grew up in the world of Christian apologetics (I’m still there), and I can remember numerous occasions when some wizened sage would make it their goal in life to permanently disabuse us of the hope of our beloved pet ever making it into the New Heavens and Earth. Aside from the theological dubiousness of this assertion, what would possess someone to say this to a child?
For that matter, why would we tell them that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Great Pumpkin, or any other mythic childhood creature isn’t real? I’m aware I’m walking through a glorified minefield here, especially in Christian circles, so I’ll rephrase: What’s the harm in a young kid believing in the Great Pumpkin?
I can hear a litany of familiar responses. The Great Pumpkin isn’t real! Worse, he might undermine trust between you and the young people in your life, possibly predisposing them to some form of unbelief. It’s a fine line between the Great Pumpkin and Jesus and one day a scary atheist professor might hammer the final nail in the coffin of your kid’s already fragile faith. At the risk of causing offense, this is nonsense. First of all, adults indulge in their fair share of fantasy, most of it a good deal less wholesome than the Great Pumpkin. More importantly, as I’ll argue below, figures like the Great Pumpkin can be excellent tutors of desire.
My son is currently in the habit of asking me about the existence of impossible toys. His latest inquiry concerned a kid-sized helicopter. (It’s not as outlandish as it sounds when you consider that he’s just extrapolating from the children’s electric vehicles that clutter so many suburban garages.) At first, I subjected him to a tendentious lecture on the rigors of flight school and air safety and then I heard myself and had the good sense to shut up and start again.
Wishful thinking is a vital expression of the human heart and figures like the Great Pumpkin, trivial as they may seem, can play an important role in bringing childhood desires to a greater state of maturity.
“That would be amazing. What would you do if you had one?” I asked. “I would take my sister for a ride over the neighborhood. Maybe land on our roof.” I had to admit the prospect sounded enchanting. It brought to mind a similar childhood wish I’d once had for a small, impenetrable submersible that would allow me to explore the deepest trenches of the ocean in perfect safety. I sure am glad my parents didn’t blather on about the immense ocean pressure involved and the expertise needed for such a voyage. Plenty of children’s shows that style themselves as “scientific” aim to do this very kind of thing, of course, presenting a fanciful scenario only to debunk it with a scientific explanation. I’m not opposed to science, but let’s not try to smuggle a child’s dreams into a laboratory. What’s more dangerous, an over-active imagination or inveterate reductionism?
Too Good to Be True: The Joy of True Wishes
Wishful thinking is a vital expression of the human heart and figures like the Great Pumpkin, trivial as they may seem, can play an important role in bringing childhood desires to a greater state of maturity. A kid dreaming of a toy-dispensing pumpkin may elicit a scowl of disapproval or a bemused chuckle, but behind this wish is something more timeless. As with Santa, the Great Pumpkin is said to reward virtue. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that this is a nascent desire for cosmic justice and a world where vice is punished and virtue rewarded? What about the promise of toys? We often chide kids about their infatuation with Christmas presents, assuming their fixation is merely avaricious. But I don’t think it strains credulity to suggest that the delight kids take in gifts is a small expression of a deeper desire for abundant life and the experience of enduring newness, joy, and wonder.
It’s true that we outgrow figures like Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Great Pumpkin. Many anxious Christian grownups worry that our Lord will suffer a similar fate in the lives of kids who once bought into Santa and all the rest. But we don’t outgrow our desires for cosmic justice and abundant life. Nor, for that matter, do we outgrow our desires for love and friendship, meaning and purpose, and life after death.
Deep, innate desires like those can’t be satisfied with presents under a tree or in a pumpkin patch, no matter how sincere. The fact that we all have such desires, though, has led to profound spiritual introspection from some truly remarkable figures. From Blaise Pascal to Miguel de Unamuno to C. S. Lewis, there is a powerful tradition of Christian thought that takes these desires as a clue about the nature of reality. The philosopher Clifford Williams has also done good work in refining this argument.
Clearly, nobody is born with a desire to fly like Superman, drive a sports car, and support a team of perpetual champions. Though common, wishes like this are all acquired. The deeper desires for love, meaning, and abundant life—what the Hebrew tradition calls Shalom—are universal and innate. Their ubiquity is a testament to the fact that God has set eternity in the hearts of men (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
Who or what can rise to the challenge of these persistent desires? It’s certainly not the Great Pumpkin, but if we look back on our own childhoods, we can see Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Great Pumpkin for what they were: stepping stones.
