There is a good article posted by the Star Bulletin that goes behind the scenes of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special – from the perspective of Lee Mendelson, the producer.
Baseball has been very, very good to Lee Mendelson. More than four decades ago, the Bay area film producer had just wrapped a television documentary on Willie Mays and was leafing through the newspaper when a comic strip about baseball caught his eye — hapless Charlie Brown laid low by a fastball.
He laughed. Then he thought, “I’ve done the best baseball player in the world, why not do the worst?” So he called “Peanuts” cartoonist Charles Schulz, who, as it turned out, lived right down the peninsula.
One of the things I thought interesting was that Charles Schulz so hated the ‘Peanuts’ title for his strip, that he refused to use it as the title of any of the TV specials.