How to Play "Christmas Time Is Here" 🎄🎹 (Beginner Piano Arrangement)

It's time to learn one of Kevin's favorite Christmas songs of all time - "Christmas Time Is Here", made famous by the 1965 television special A Charlie Brown Christmas one of the first animated Christmas specials produced for network television in the United States.

In this lesson, you will learn Kevin's very own arrangement of this song from The Pianote Christmas Songbook--- Get it here :) https://www.pianote.com/shop/christma...

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"Christmas Time Is Here" was composed by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi to accompany the opening of the 1965 television special 'A Charlie Brown Christmas'. It was originally written as an instrumental, but producer Lee Mendelson decided that the song needed lyrics. Mendelson recalled, "When we looked at the show about a month before it was to go on the air, I said, 'That's such a pretty melody; maybe we should try and find some people to put some lyrics to it.'" When he was unable to find someone available, he wrote the lyrics himself:

"So I sat down with an envelope — I'll never forget this — at our kitchen table and wrote 'Christmas Time Is Here' in about ten minutes. It was a poem that just came to me — never changed the words to this day. It was only about a minute long. And Vince got a bunch of little kids together to sing it."

The vocals for the song were provided by the children's choir at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in San Rafael. Guaraldi had previously performed with the ensemble at his May 1965 "jazz mass" performance at Grace Cathedral.

"Christmas Time Is Here" remains a popular Christmas song long after its release; as Matt Thompson of The Atlantic writes, "If it wasn’t already a standard that first time it was played, it is now the very definition." Erik Adams of The A.V. Club pointed to the song's juxtaposition of nostalgic lyrics and minor-key composition as a reason for its longevity: "As 'Christmastime Is Here' and the other songs from A Charlie Brown Christmas have been folded into the catalog of enduring Christmas carols, they’ve continued to stand out by representing a particular strain of wintry melancholy."

The song has also charted on the Holiday 100, reaching number 17 in 2017—over 50 years after its original release!

Enjoy this Christmas classic with Kevin and let us know what you think in the comments below :)

Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
0:20 - LH Pedal Intro
0:44 - RH - Measures 1-4
1:38 - HT - Measures 1-4
2:22 - RH - Measures 5-12
5:32 - LH - Measures 5-12
6:49 - HT - Measures 5-12
7:34 - 2nd Ending
7:49 - LH - Measures 14-17
8:23 - RH - Measures 14-17
9:06 - LH - Measures 18-21
9:55 - RH - Measures 17-21
10:27 - HT - Measures 14-21
11:05 - HT - Measures 22-29
11:31 - End Chord Fmaj9
11:59 - Play Through

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