The central plot of
A Charlie Brown Christmas was inspired by producer Lee Mendelson, who told Schulz that he and his wife had celebrated a recent Christmas by reading Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir Tree” to their children. Schulz spun that into a tale of two trees, hitting upon an impossibly neat symbol of commercialized: aluminum Christmas at war with good ol’ classic evergreen.
I ask you to look at the above picture, however, and imagine yourself in 1965. If you were actually going to buy an aluminum Christmas tree, you were probably buying an Evergleam from Aluminum Specialties in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. You were going to get it at a department store or order it from the Sears catalogue, not at a tree farm the whole point was that it came in a box and was easy to assemble right there in your stylish mod home! So including an actual fake tree farm is freaking brilliant satire, which unfortunately backfired on me.