What a wonderful Christmas bonus - new Charlie Brown Christmas cartoons!

A Charlie Brown Christmas (8 p.m. today, Channels 9, 2) will be followed by five new animated vignettes - one each for Lucy, Linus, Snoopy, Sally and Charlie Brown - called Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales.

Longtime "Peanuts'' producers Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez have done the impossible: They have improved a masterpiece.

Christmas Tales, adapted from the late Charles M. Schulz's vast cartoon library, draw on familiar themes - letters to Santa, ice skating, scrawny Christmas trees, unrequited love and the Bible.

All are accompanied by Vince Guaraldi's incomparable jazz score, performed by David Benoit - except when Snoopy, as a street-corner Santa, plays "Christmas Time is Here" on an accordion.

ON THE AIR

What: A Charlie Brown Christmas and Charlie Brown's Christmas Tales When: 8-9 p.m. today, Channels 9, 2. Repeats: 9-10 p.m. Friday, Channels 9, 2.

Good grief! It's as if Mr. Schulz, who died in 2000, was supervising the production.

"He taught me well," Mr. Mendelson says with a laugh.

Why mess with success? Because A Charlie Brown Christmas had to be expanded so it could air uncut. The 1965 special runs 26 minutes, four minutes longer than today's half-hour shows. So ABC wanted 18 more minutes to fill an hour.

Mr. Mendelson, 69, and his staff started by reading all of the "Peanuts" comic strips about the holidays.

"There is all of this wonderful material from one of the greatest gag writers of all times," he explains. (The opening credit reads, "Created and written by Charles Schulz.")

The Mendelson-Melendez team also admittedly learned from their mistakes. Namely, the embarrassing 1992 It's Christmas Time Again, Charlie Brown special. It was so bad that CBS never repeated it.

"That was one of the very few shows that didn't work," says Mr. Mendelson, who produced all 46 Charlie Brown TV specials. "Having done that second Christmas show, I didn't want to do a third one. The only way we could do it was to do a different format. This seemed like a better way to go."

They wisely chose to make three-minute cartoons, instead of assembling the gags into one long story, a major failing of It's Christmas Time Again.

Just the basics

The new Christmas Tales sticks with the core characters and original music. No Peppermint Patty, no Marcy. No horns, flutes and other instruments.

The Christmas Tales arrive as greeting cards from the characters:

Sally, Charlie Brown's little sister, sends her Christmas list in a letter to "Samantha Claus." She tells her brother: "The white beard is just sort of a disguise."

Soon she comes home from school in tears. "I should have known," she says, "There is no Samantha Claus!"

Charlie Brown draws a "special Christmas card for the little red-haired girl" while Snoopy ice skates with Lucy.

Lucy smugly explainsthat brother Linus buy her a gift: "You have to give me a Christmas present! It says so in the Bible!"

To which Linus points out to Lucy, and millions of viewers of all ages: "The Bible says nothing about giving Christmas presents."

That's pure Schulz.

The deeply religious Minnesota native insisted that his first "Peanuts" TV special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, include the story of the birth of Jesus. It remains one of the few holiday TV specials that quotes the Bible. Certainly that's one reason for its enduring popularity.

"Back then, nobody was animating something from the Bible," Mr. Mendelson says. "If we hadn't gone that way, we wouldn't have done the (first) show."

Less is more

Much has been written over the last 37 years about how the producers and CBS executives thought A Charlie Brown Christmas "was awful," to use Mr. Mendelson's words. It was too slow and too religious. With too many children, and no adults. And all that jazz seemed out of place. You blockhead!

"We thought we had ruined `Peanuts'," Mr. Mendelson says.

But not Mr. Schulz.

"He liked the show. He was smarter than us," the producer says.

Ironically, CBS and Coca-Cola originally wanted a one-hour Charlie Brown Christmas special in 1965. The producers balked.

"I always felt less is better than more," Mr. Mendelson says. "I told them that I think we could do a really good half-hour."

Now, 37 years later, fans finally will see a one-hour Charlie Brown Christmas. It's one of the television's finest hours.

E-mail jkiesewetter@enquirer.com