Ever since its debut in 1965, everything about the A Charlie Brown Christmas TV special–the animation, the dance scenes, the choir numbers, the Vince Guaraldi soundtrack–has passed into the realm of the iconic. And the most iconic of all has been Linus’s recitation of Luke 2:8-20 in the special’s climax:

Indeed, this scene has in recent years become a kind of Culture War flashpoint, treated by many U.S. religious conservatives as a sort of bulwark against the secularization of American society generally; some have even declaimed its recent transition from broadcast television to AppleTV’s subscription service as some sort of pseudo-censorship of the last public acknowledgment of Christ’s centrality to Christmas.

Which is all somewhat ironic (and part of me wonders if Charles Schultz anticipated this development), because the very following year in 1966, he and NBC debuted the Peanuts Halloween special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!, which features that same Linus in a central role, only this time cast as a particularly delusional form of religious fanatic, one anxiously awaiting deliverance from a Great Pumpkin who never comes.

Seriously, it’s like Waiting for Godot for children:

What’s the right reading here, then? I suppose if you’re some sort of religious fundamentalist, you could read Schultz as proclaiming Christ’s divinity during the Christmas special while mocking any sort of other type of religious belief in the Halloween one. Or, if you have any sort of sympathy towards an agnostic/atheist reading, you could see Schultz as cleverly undermining the religious certitude of the Christmas special with the religious futility of the Halloween. Maybe this is all just another example of art-as-Rorschach-Test, wherein what you see in these two specials will always reveal more about yourself than it will about Schulz.

Or maybe this is another example of how there must needs be opposition in all things, and perhaps why Christmas and Halloween pair so well together in the final quarter of the year: they express simultaneously our faith and our fear, our hope and our despair, that there is something to justify our religious expectations and that there is nothing at all to comfort us in the night. You cannot have one without the other. Perhaps its not so much a message but a mood that Charles Schulz sought to express with the one-two punch of these twin specials: the two sides of our religious experience, the lightness and the darkness, the joy and the despair, neither of which we can have without the other.