[Peace-discuss] The Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us

[Lisa Chason]

The Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us

 

By Harold Meyerson

 

Wednesday, December 21, 2005; Page 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?

 

meyersonh at washpost.com

 

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