'White Christmas' is a carol all Americans can enjoy; its history has lessons about overcoming sad times

'May your days be merry and bright.'
(Photo by Chandler Cruttenden, Unsplash)

Dreaming of a White Christmas? Many people do -- even 80 years after the song's debut. With a "new kind of Christmas carol" Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby helped make Christmas a holiday all Americans could celebrate, writes Ray Rast for The Conversation, a journalistic platform for academics. In 1940, Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant, wrote "the quintessential American song, White Christmas, which the popular entertainer Bing Crosby eventually made famous."

But the 1940s was a "profoundly sad time for humanity. World War II – what would become the deadliest war in human history – had begun in Europe and Asia, just as Americans were starting to pick up the pieces from the Great Depression," Rast explains. "Today, it can seem like humanity is at another tipping point: political polarization, war in the Middle East and Europe, a global climate crisis. Yet, like other historians, I've long thought that the study of the past can help point the way forward. White Christmas has resonated for more than 80 years, and I think the reasons why are worth understanding."

Part of the song's lasting charm is its melodic nostalgia for what Americans hope for during the holidays. "The Christmases that Berlin and Crosby 'used to know' were those of the 1910s and 1920s, when the season expanded to include the nation's first public Christmas tree lighting ceremony and the appearance of Santa Claus at the end of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade."

Berlin's inspiration for the song came in 1937 when he spent Christmas alone. "Berlin had connected his lonesome Christmas to the broader turmoil of the time, including the outbreak of World War II and fraught debates about America's role in the world," Rast explains. "This new song reflected his response: a dream of better times and places. It evoked a small town of yesteryear in which horse-drawn sleighs crossed freshly fallen snow. It also imagined a future in which dark days would be 'merry and bright' once again. . . .This was a new kind of Christmas carol. It did not mention the birth of Jesus, angels or wise men – and it was a song that all Americans, including Jewish immigrants, could embrace."

Bing Crosby was already an American favorite. When 'Holiday Inn' premiered in August 1942, "reviewers barely mentioned the song, but ordinary Americans couldn't get enough of it," Rast writes. "By December, it was on every radio, in every jukebox. . . . The key reason was the nation's entry into World War II. . . . White Christmas was not overtly patriotic, but it made Americans think about why they fought, sacrificed and endured separation from their loved ones. As an editorial in the Buffalo Courier-Express concluded, the song 'provided a forcible reminder that we are fighting for the right to dream and for memories to dream about.'. . . This made it a song all Americans could embrace, including those not always treated like Americans."

To read Rast's entire essay, click here.