Dreaming

White Christmas

The sun is shining, the grass is green,

 The orange and palm trees sway. 

There's never been such a day in Beverly Hills, L.A.

 But it's December the twenty-fourth,— 

And I am longing to be up North— 

 I'm dreaming of a White Christmas

 Just like the ones I used to know

 Where the treetops glisten and children listen

 To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

 I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

 With every Christmas card I write

 May your days be merry and bright

 And may all your Christmases be white.

--words and music by Irving Berlin

 “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin is probably the first modern Christmas song. He wrote it for a stage musical which instead became the movie, Holiday Inn, released in 1942. Reputedly he said it was not only the best song he’d ever written, but the best song anybody had ever written. It is sometimes noted that Berlin’s son died on Christmas day in 1928.

 It took awhile for the song to catch on, but it was a hit by the time the Academy Awards presented it the Oscar for best original song. Bing Crosby, who first sang it on the radio, shortly after Pearl Harbor in December 1941, had the initial hit record, which by some reckoning is the biggest selling single of all time. But many others have recorded it—some years back I created a pretty good collage of versions by Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Ella Fitzgerald and a choral version, which fortunately were all in the same key. There have been many more recent versions, and the song has been a hit as recently as 2020.

 Crosby starred in Holiday Inn and sang the song as a duet with Marjorie Reynolds, and then sang it solo in another movie, White Christmas, in 1954. That movie—in VistaVision color-- also starred Danny Kaye and Rosemary Clooney. If I didn’t have a crush on her before, I did after that movie. I must have seen Holiday Inn shortly before that as well. 

 I was in the third grade in 1954. I saw the sheet music for “White Christmas” on my uncle Carl’s piano at my grandparents, and I read the lyrics, which begin with the set-up that is almost never sung (even less often than the opening to “Pennies From Heaven.”) The idea of being somewhere that it doesn’t snow for Christmas fascinated me. It was the subject of my first play, started as a class assignment and finished out of sheer exuberance. It was called “A Summer Christmas,” about a family (a very 1950s situation comedy family) coping with a Christmas without snow (until, of course, at the last minute, it does snow.) My fellow third graders performed it, and were its audience.

 A Christmas without snow was barely imaginable to me in western Pennsylvania in 1954. Now I live in California, but it is becoming normal for many other places now to see Christmas and winter without snow. Much of the world I knew is gone, and much of the rest of it is going.

 This lyric (just nine lines repeated) is really about nostalgia for an image of Christmas—one that just about guarantees disappointment in its reality. (The word “white” has complicated connotations these days as well.) But some of the images evoke moments in memory, and for this—as well as the history this song represents—it’s become an inevitable part of the season, at least if you’ve lived through some of this history. And you remember snow.