Mr. Vince Guaraldi with “Christmastime Is Here,” from the soundtrack for 1965’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Here’s a thoughtful essay by a guy named Erik Adams at The Onion’s A.V. Club about Guaraldi’s score for the TV show.

The music within is both timeless and timely: The off-the-cuff nature of its recording promises endless surprises, but the choice to pair a children’s cartoon with jazz hardly qualifies as avant garde in 2012. As a classmate of mine sarcastically pointed out when I played the CD in my 10th-grade English class, it’s “cocktail hour” music, hardly the bold affront to The Way Things Are Done that it was in 1965, when cartoons were either set to stock orchestral pieces or public-domain recordings.

Think about that for a minute. The author’s right. Remember all the Bugs Bunny cartoons which used classical music as the score? Jazz was unprecedented as an accompaniment to a cartoon when the producers asked Guaraldi to create the soundtrack.