Lee Mendelson, an Emmy Award-winning producer who was instrumental in bringing the holiday staple “A Charlie Brown Christmas” to television in 1965 and who wrote the enduring lyrics to the song “Christmas Time Is Here,” died on Christmas morning at his home in Hillsborough, Calif., about 15 miles south of San Francisco He was 86.

His son Jason said the cause was congestive heart failure, and that Mr. Mendelson had had lung cancer. He said his father’s death on Christmas “was a pretty serendipitous thing.”

For more than 50 years “A Charlie Brown Christmas” has endured as a staple of holiday season programming, but the project would not have been created were it not for Mr. Mendelson’s persistence.

Mr. Mendelson was initially turned down when he approached Charles M. Schulz, the creator of “Peanuts,” about making a documentary about his life and the comic strip starring Charlie Brown and Snoopy, he told The Los Angeles Times in 2015.