It's hard to imagine the holidays without "A Charlie Brown Christmas." The 1965 broadcast has become a staple of the season for many generations.

But this beloved TV special almost didn't make it to air. CBS executives thought the 25-minute program was too slow, too serious and too different from the upbeat spectacles they imagined audiences wanted. A cartoon about a depressed kid seeking psychiatric advice with no laugh track, lo-fi animation and a Bible passage seemed destined to fail.

Yet against all the odds, it became a classic. The program turned "Peanuts" from a popular comic strip into a multimedia empire -- not because it was flashy or followed the rules, but because it was sincere.

As a business professor who has studied the "Peanuts" franchise, I see "A Charlie Brown Christmas" as a fascinating historical moment. These days it's unlikely that an unassuming comic strip character voicing hefty, thought-provoking ideas would make it to air.

The special came together out of a last-minute scramble. Somewhat out of the blue, producer Lee Mendelson got a call from advertising agency McCann-Erickson: Coca-Cola wanted to sponsor an animated Christmas special.

Mendelson called up comic strip creator Charles "Sparky" Schulz and told him he had just sold "A Charlie Brown Christmas" -- and they would have mere months to write, animate and bring the special to air.

Schulz, Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez worked fast to piece together a storyline. The cartoonist wanted to tell a story that cut through the glitz of holiday commercialism and brought the focus back to something deeper.

While Snoopy tries to win a Christmas lights contest, and Lucy names herself "Christmas queen" in the neighborhood play, a forlorn Charlie Brown searches for "the real meaning of Christmas." He makes his way to the local lot of aluminum trees, a fad at the time. But he's drawn to the one real tree -- a humble, scraggly little thing -- inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale " The Fir Tree."

Those plot points would likely delight the network, but other choices Schulz made were proving controversial.

The show would use real children's voices instead of adult actors', giving the characters an authentic, simple charm. And Schulz refused to add a laugh track, a standard in animated TV at the time. He wanted the sincerity of the story to stand on its own.

Most alarming to the executives was Schulz's insistence on including the heart of the Nativity story in arguably the special's most pivotal scene.

When Schulz discussed this idea with Mendelson and Melendez, they were hesitant. For much of U.S. history, Protestant Christianity was the default in American culture, but in the years since World War II, society had grown somewhat more mindful of making room for Catholic and Jewish Americans. Unsure how to handle the shifting norms, many mainstream entertainment companies in the 1960s tended to avoid religious topics.

Fortunately for the "Peanuts" franchise, when the special aired on Dec. 9, 1965, it was an instant success. Nearly half of American households tuned in, and the program won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. Schulz had tapped into something audiences were craving: an honest, heartfelt message that cut through the commercialism.

Millions of viewers have continued to tune in to the special in the almost 60 years since it first aired.