strib: Berlin's 'White Christmas' paved way

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Harold Meyerson: Berlin's 'White Christmas' paved way

December 25, 2005

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"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 Germany 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.

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"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 one 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?


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NOT! Yes O'Lielly go back to where you came from!

always thought of Christmas and still do ..I'm just not into the current stress levels it has mass produced.

Where did bo come from?..Pluto?

was in a Crosby/Danny Kaye movie called White Christmas. It also starred Vera Ellen and Rosemary Clooney and Dean Jagger as the General.

Holiday Inn. Lovely black and white movie with lots of toe-tapping tunes.

from 1942, in black and white.

The song was such a success that was used for the movie that you mentioned in color from 1954.

of the earlier "Holiday Inn."

In Holiday Inn, the Bing Crosby character is buying an inn in Vermont (I think) and is going to open it only for holidays. And that's where you had all of those beautiful songs. Fred Astaire is his former partner in a cabaret act who is in the habit of stealing any woman after which the Crosby character longs.

The woman that he loves, who sings in all the performances is then being whisked to Hollywood to start in a "White Christmas" movie and the Fred Astaire character is ready to marry her, even though she loves Crosby.

Crosby does go to Hollywood, manages to sneak into the stage where the last scene is being filmed and get the girl. sniff sniff.

In White Christmas, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are old buddies with their own cabaret show, again. They hear that their former commander who is having an inn is hurting and are planning to get their former unit to celebrate Christmas there, and are planning to broadcast their show live from the inn to promote it. There are some misunderstanding and a way to help the old general without it appears as charity.

Rosemary Clooney - the late aunt of George, and Vera Allen provide the two female voices for the quartet.

Both are great movies and both with Bing Crosby but they are not remake of each other.

the real spark that got the Christmas holiday going was the poem...The Night Before Christmas. Thats where Santa became a real person in the minds of children and many adults.Before that the religious aspect of the time was not a widespread observance but the tinsel, lights, cookies and milk for the bearded intruder became commonplace, sliding down chimneys became a magical feat. the idea of flying reindeer took hold and houses became multi-colored beacons in the night sky. And of course giving presents took on greater importance than they ever had.

I just watched "Holiday Inn" a few times on AMC and it seems to me there was no message in the movie at all. I viewed it as sheer escapism.

a secular holiday. Yes, all the images of Santa, and gifts, and family get together, and roasting chestnuts in the cold dark days of the year were not about Christ but about national fuzzy feeling.

It is Fox and O'Reilly and the fanatics that got Bush at the White House that all of a sudden want to turn this country into a theocracy and Christmas into a religious holiday.

One thing about the American Christmas, it turned a relatively minor Jewish holiday - Hanukkah, into a "Jewish Christmas" with Hanukkah Menorah in public places. Disgusting, really. Neither a Nativity scene nor any Hanukkah symbol belong on public places... except, I suppose, in a mall to bring entice shoppers to spend, spend, spend.

THANKS! :hi:

--is another song Crosby sings in the picture...during the Christmas season...what a couple of unAmerican SOBs he and Irving Berlin were...the War on Christmas goes all the way back to 1942...!

And when you consider that Irving Berlin was Jewish, it becomes even more interesting to consider that he had no problems writing songs like "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade," most likely because he didn't regard their content as somehow being offensive to his religion. "White Christmas" essentially is about wishing it would snow on December 25; "Easter Parade" about wanting to arrogantly show off your new spring clothes after you get out of a worship service. There's nothing particularly Christian about either song, other than that both are about ostensibly Christian holidays.

If you want to find something really offensive in "Holiday Inn," you need look no further than the Lincoln's Birthday scene, in which a bunch of white performers dress in blackface with pickaninny braids and play music and sing about how wonderful Abraham Lincoln was because (and this is in the words of the black housekeeper to her children), he "set the darkies free." It's a part of the movie that is horrifically naive and racist in retrospect, but it's not as if it can be easily excised from the movie as a whole, because essential plot points take place and part of them hinge on the fact that a character is in blackface and thus cannot easily be recognized by someone else.