Irving Berlin had concocted a monster, and he knew it. "I just wrote the best song I've ever written" he told his secretary as he set down his pen. That's quite an audacious observation from a man who had already written such 'Great American Songbook' standards as "Blue Skies", "Puttin' in the Ritz" and "God Bless America", but in this instance, as time would prove, Berlin wasn't exaggerating.
He had been mulling the concept of the song for a few years, according to later accounts, but didn't sit down to actually write it until 1940. The opening stanza was primarily autobiographical:
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...
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...
Born in Russia in 1888, Berlin emigrated with his family to the United States when he was five, and like so many other Jewish immigrants, they settled in the teeming tenements of New York City. His father was a cantor, and Irving (nee Israel) was raised in religious tradition. But like so many of that generation of immigrant children, Berlin saw himself as an American first, and Jewish second (and Russian a far distant third. Later, he said that the only memory he still had of his life in the old country was of watching a mob burn his family's home to the ground during one of Russia's bloody pogroms against the Jews).
As a teenager he dropped out of school and began working as a singer in saloons, teaching himself piano. He eventually got himself a job as a song plugger for music publishers, performing newly written tunes for other singers in the hopes that they would include them in their act, and maybe even make one of those newfangled records out of them (it's a time-honored profession; that's how Elton John got his start in music). Irving soon concluded that he could write better songs than some of the stuff he was hawking, and he began composing.
Within a few short years, he was a tremendously successful songwriter, creating both standalone tunes (including "Alexander's Ragtime Band," which sparked perhaps the first popular dance craze, 'The International', which swept the U.S. and was equally popular in Europe in 1913), as well as writing Broadway scores, including for "The Coconuts" with the Marx Brothers. His success allowed him to relocate to Southern California, where with the coming of 'talking pictures', he began writing songs for the movies as well.
But while he appreciated the sunny and warm year-round climate of Los Angeles, Berlin always remained a New Yawker at heart, hence his lament in the opening stanza of his latest tune. However, Irving's enthusiasm for those lines was shared by few others, and when circumstances later made them awkward to continue including, he grudgingly agreed to strike them from the official lyric sheet, leaving only a scanty eight lines of lyrics in the entire song. But it was a decision he never had cause to regret.
Berlin hadn't set out to write just another Christmas song. On a subtle, almost subversive level, he wanted to change American culture forever. And he did.
The best way to examine this is to study the remaining lyrics:
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.
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.
May your days be merry and bright/
And may all your Christmases be white.
What do you notice about this Christmas carol? The distinct absence of any mention or allusion to Christ...or even Santa Claus, who at least (in his St. Nicholas incarnation) has a quasi-religious inference.
For decades, Christmas had been slowly transforming in the United States from a distinct religious observance to a more national, "democratic" sort of holiday, the metamorphosis hastened by the adoption of Europe's somewhat stern Father Christmas (better known in the U.S. as Santa Claus) into a jolly gift-giver designed to appeal specifically to young children. With the great influx of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, various Old World end-of-year traditions entered into the melting pot, and became a part of the Christmas festivities.
A great many of those immigrants were Jewish and, wishing to integrate into this new land, they found themselves celebrating a Christian holiday that, with each passing year, took on more and more secular shades.
By the 1930s, Christmas had made the transition from a day of feasting and religious observation to feasting and giving presents to family and friends. Santa Claus could be found on billboards and in magazine ads shilling for Coca Cola. The Montgomery Ward department store chain created its own original character, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and marketed him with a best-selling children's book, stuffed toys, and various other pieces of merchandise (and in 1949 would produce a #1 hit song about the character, sung by Gene Autry), reaping a bounty in Rudolph-related paraphernalia for generations to come. The concept of Christmas as an agency of promoting a general peace and good will to mankind, rather than as a veneration of Jesus Christ, further took hold with the era's multiple film and radio adaptations of "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens, which even as far back as 1843 gave only a nominal nod to the Almighty (invoking His grace to bless us, everyone).
Contributing somewhat hesitantly to this transformation were Christmas carols. In 1940, the most popular remained the old standards, dating back to the 19th Century and earlier, and steeped in religious iconography: "Silent Night", "Angels We Have Heard on High", "The First Noel", and the like. Since the latter 1800s there had been a smattering of more secular holiday tunes..."Jingle Bells" (1857), "Up on the House Top" (1864), "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" (1934)...but most of the newer entries in the canon hewed closer to religious themes, such as "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful" (1925).
Berlin wanted to change that by giving America a truly secular Christmas song that could serve as a veritable anthem for the holiday, the way his "God Bless America" had emerged as a near-substitute for the actual National Anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner". He wanted every non-Christian in the world who wanted and needed to celebrate Christmas to have a carol that invited them to enjoy the celebration on an equal plateau as the most devout Christian.
And once he wrote "White Christmas", he did...nothing. He didn't publish it and make it available to anyone to record. This is because he had a concept for a musical film that he intended the song for, a movie about a country inn that performed improbably lavish song and dance productions on various holidays throughout the year. He pitched it to Paramount Studios because he envisioned only one man who could play the lead, and that performer was contracted to that studio: Bing Crosby.
Bing and Paramount liked the film's concept, but Crosby had one reservation: "White Christmas". As an ardent Catholic, he was reluctant to perform a non-religious carol. Already America's most popular singer, he had scored over 100 hit songs since 1927, when he began his career as the singer for Paul Whiteman's Orchestra (by the time of his death in 1977, Crosby had had more #1 hits than Elvis Presley and the Beatles combined), and had already recorded a number of Christmas carols, but all of them traditional fare such as "Adeste Fideles" (with the first half sung in Latin) and "Silent Night". Crosby was sympathetic to Berlin's intent on creating a secular anthem, but the Jesuit student in him was already uncomfortable with the commercialization of Christmas (see the aforementioned Coke Santa), and didn't wish to add to it.
But Berlin and others made their cases for the song, and Bing had to admit it was a really good tune. Finally he consented, but his nearly infallible sense of what made a song work told him to drop the opening lyrics about Beverly Hills. Berlin protested, but Crosby recognized that the true strength of the song was the universal empathetic nature of the rest of the words, and that 'woe is me' bit about a green Christmas in sunny California worked in opposition to that sentiment.
Prior to filming the movie (with co-star Fred Astaire), titled HOLIDAY INN, Bing gave "White Christmas" a try-out on his weekly radio program, The Kraft Music Hall, just a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, and it produced nary a ripple; there was no feedback from listeners either yay or nay, so Crosby set the song aside. It wasn't as if anyone expected it to be a hit anyway. Berlin, Paramount and Decca Records, which was releasing the soundtrack, all pegged "Be Careful, It's My Heart" as the big hit from the film.
But then a funny thing happened: late in the summer, while the film was doing great box office in theaters, radio station DJs around the country began getting listener requests for "White Christmas". The trickle became a torrent. By mid-September it had made the charts and was rising fast. By Halloween...a full month before retailers in 1942 would even dare consider putting up their Xmas decorations...the song hit #1 on the charts, and stayed there for 11 straight weeks. For good measure, it also spent several weeks atop the R&B chart, a previously segregated listing, making it Crosby's first...but not last...visit to the "race" chart.
With World War II raging, Crosby pushed aside the stage fright that had kept him from doing live concerts for a decade, and began performing exclusively for either troops as part of USO package tours at home and abroad, while visiting military hospitals, or at war bond rallies. Without fail, the one song in his entire canon that everyone wanted to hear was "White Christmas". Sometimes Bing would open his performance with the tune, but the audience would always call for an encore of it at the end, so he made it his regular closing number.
Years later, he would tell of what was perhaps the most poignant moment in his long career. In late 1944 he was in France with the USO, performing for several thousand U.S. troops in a section of real estate that had been, just days earlier, in German control. As he sang "White Christmas", a complete hush fell over the large crowd. Witnesses said you couldn't even hear anyone breathing. When Bing finished with "...and may all your Christmases be white", the silence continued. No one clapped or whistled, they all just sat there not making a sound. Many of them were weeping. There they were fighting the most brutal war in history, with Christmas fast approaching, but they all knew that, God willing, this would be their last Christmas away from home. The song touched each of them so deeply, they couldn't let that moment of peace go.
Bing would then follow up that touching observation by grimly noting that the Battle of the Bulge erupted not long thereafter, and all too many of those soldiers didn't live to see that Christmas, nor any other.
The song went on to win the Academy Award. Indeed, it produced a humorous moment, as Berlin himself happened to be the presenter of that award. Opening the envelope and reading his own name, he picked up the Oscar and quipped, "I'm glad to present the award...I've known him for a long time."
Decca re-released "White Christmas" at the end of 1945, and once again it went to #1...a feat it repeated yet again in '46. Re-released in each subsequent year, it continued to chart again and again, until finally in 1962 Billboard created a specific Holiday Songs chart and relegated it to there from the Top 40. In the U.K. it continued to hit the pop charts until 1998.
A little known fact is that the version we almost always hear now is not the original. In 1947 it was discovered that the master disc of the song was damaged, and thus any future pressings would have to be from a second generation copy, which would produce a noticeable diminishing in fidelity. Instead, Crosby and Decca reassembled all of the original musicians and background singers and produced a note-for-note remake of the original, adding only a new touch of flutes and celesta right at the very beginning, and no one seemed to notice the difference. Recording technology had improved since 1942, and all concerned agreed that the '47 remake sounded cleaner and more vibrant that the first copy. And that's the version we continue to hear to this day.
To say that "White Christmas" is a tremendous hit would be a monumental understatement. Crosby's version alone, as a single and as part of various holiday albums, has sold some 50 million copies. That in and of itself makes the tune the best-selling song of all time. But then add to that various other versions, performed by artists ranging from Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams and Bette Midler to the Drifters, Otis Redding and Elvis Presley, have racked up additional 50 million copies sold.
Crosby, typically, was humble about his role in the song's success, saying that virtually anyone who sang it would have had the hit. But the truth is, it's hard to imagine any other singer investing as much talent and heart into the song as Crosby did.
Berlin likewise wasn't one to brag about it, but then, he didn't have to. One need only look at everything that came after "White Christmas" to realize it was every bit the culture-altering triumph he had hoped it would be. The song's success opened up the floodgates for secular Christmas songs, filling the airwaves with everything from "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and "Silver Bells" to "Feliz Navidad" and "All I Want for Christmas is You". And perhaps most profoundly, it played a crucial role in transfiguring Christmas into the holiday it is today, where Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindi, Buddhists, and even atheists can share in the spirit of peace and joy, even if they aren't exalting a tiny swaddling babe in a manger. And honestly, is there anything more 'Christmas' than that?
May your days be merry and bright....
