Christmas Day is a week away.
Here’s the story of a long-ago Christmas in a far-away land.
This story was told at a time when many Americans celebrated Christmas as best they could in a far-away land.
In 1965, Charles Schulz had started drawing Snoopy as a World War I flying ace battling the Red Baron. But “it reached a point where war just didn’t seem funny,” he told biographer Rheta Grimsley Johnson.
Even so, Snoopy and the Red Baron inspired this novelty Christmas song with explosions, gunfire and a message of hope that came as the Vietnam War escalated in 1967.
Christmas bells those Christmas bellsRinging through the landBringing peace to all the worldAnd good will to man
Listen for them …
“Snoopy’s Christmas,” the Royal Guardsmen, from “Snoopy and His Friends,” 1967.
The Royal Guardsmen started in Ocala, Florida, in the mid-’60s. Today, all five surviving band members are in their 70s and are “mostly retired,” singer Chris Nunley told Goldmine magazine earlier this year. (Lead guitarist Tom Richards died in 1979.)
Here, also from Goldmine magazine, is a story of a kid who rediscovers this record as an adult.