Peanuts specials. This came after Coca-Cola asked Mendelson if he had a Christmas special. He said "yes." The next day he called Schulz up and said they were making "A Charlie Brown Christmas". The animated version of "Peanuts" differs in some aspects from the strip. In the strip, adult voices are heard, though conversations are usually only depicted from the children's end. To translate this aspect to the animated medium, the sound of a trombone with a solotone mute (created by Vince Guaraldi played by Dean Hubbard) was used to simulate adult "voices." A more significant deviation from the strip was
'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1977 TV special) casting Martha Raye as his mother-in-law, telling an interviewer: "It's my chance to repay her for all the times she used me in her NBC "Comedy Hour" back in the 1950s." George Gobel's casting in this production was an apparent coincidence and not related to his appearance three years earlier in a holiday special of the same name, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1974 TV special). For the climactic recitation of "A Visit from St. Nicholas," Lynde was not allowed to rely on cue cards because director Tim Kiley felt they would distract the child actors in the cast. Lynde