http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001011.html
The Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; A31
The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the
earliest ones he used to know. He spent his first five Christmases
in czarist Russia, and his only recollection of that time, at least
the only one he'd acknowledge as an adult, was that of watching his
neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good
old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.
So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his
great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his
family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East
Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all
that, a religious song. It's just that Berlin's religion was
America.
"White Christmas" is an achingly nostalgic ballad, evoking a rural
America where treetops glisten and sleigh bells ring. This was
Currier and Ives country, an idealized winter landscape created for
an urban nation that was busily shipping its young men overseas to
fight Hitler and Japan. Amid the unprecedented disruptions of the
war, "White Christmas," with its implicit assertion that we can
somehow get back to this innocent Eden, found a ready audience.
Over the subsequent six decades, in a world that's only grown more
unstable, Berlin's ode has never lost its power: Roughly 2,000
versions have been recorded since Bing Crosby's initial take.
The success of "White Christmas" paved the way for a whole new
genre of Christmas songs. Two years after Berlin's ballad first
appeared in Paramount's "Holiday Inn," MGM filmed "Meet Me in St.
Louis," which had as its musical centerpiece the bittersweet "Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" -- a song about loved ones
trying to stay together "if the fates allow." (A film ahead of its
time, "Meet Me in St. Louis" is about a family resisting corporate
relocation.) Two years later came "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts
roasting on an open fire"), and a year after that, "Let It Snow."
By then the American Christmas song was about staying warm in
winter, about staying connected to loved ones and traditions. It
also practiced separation of church and song.
This was all rather new. Tin Pan Alley hadn't turned out many
notable Christmas songs before "White Christmas." It hasn't turned
out many since. But for a few years in the middle of the 20th
century, it produced a series of songs that remain Christmas
standards today.
Many of those Christmas songwriters, of course, were Jewish and the
children of immigrants; their deepest drive was to demonstrate
beyond all doubt that they were assimilated, cosmopolitan,
American. Berlin's father had been a cantor, but Berlin himself,
unlike the hero of "The Jazz Singer," wasn't torn between the
Jewish piety of liturgical music and the American secularism of
ragtime. When he left home at 14 to sing in the saloons of the
Bowery, he never looked back. And the religious identity of the
composer-lyricist of "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade" was as
fuzzy as it was perfunctory. A Jew married to an Irish Catholic,
Berlin raised his three daughters as nominal Protestants. Who
better to write a non-Christian Christmas song? (Berlin's may have
been an extreme case, but in the middle of the 20th century, Jewish
assimilationism was so pervasive that it gave rise to the following
crack: What's the difference between Reform Jews and Unitarians?
Unitarians don't have Christmas trees.)
"White Christmas" was one of a dozen numbers that Berlin wrote for
"Holiday Inn," each song commemorating a specific holiday. One
hesitates to impute anything so vulgar as a message to a
Crosby-Fred Astaire musical, but the message of this musical is
that we are all Americans and these are our holidays. Easter
belongs to all of us, even if it is about little more than
strolling down Fifth Avenue. Christmas belongs to all of us. The
religious content of those holidays was fine for Christian
believers, but the composer of "God Bless America" preferred to
celebrate a common national identity, complete with common holidays
that had nonsectarian meanings.
Berlin kept Christmas in the public square and, more than anyone
before or since, sent it out over the public airwaves. But it was
an American, not a Christian, Christmas. And by the crass index of
number of recordings sold, and the not-so-crass index of number of
spirits touched, Berlin's nonsectarian holiday has been the
predominant version of Christmas in this country for the past 60
years.
Now the Fox News demagogues want to impose a more sectarian
Christmas on us, supplanting the distinctly American holiday we
have celebrated lo these threescore years with a holiday that
divides us along religious lines. Bill O'Reilly can blaspheme all
he wants, but like millions of my countrymen, I take attacks on
Irving Berlin's America personally. If O'Reilly doesn't like it
here, why doesn't he go back to where he came from?
© 2005 The Washington Post Company