But there was a day not so long ago when Christmas was less about costly presents and other bribes for the kids than it was a time for families to get together, sometimes traveling considerable distances to do so. And it was also time for families, however rich or poor, to count their blessings.
This was particularly true back in America’s Jurassic Age, circa 1945-1955. The oft-maligned postwar Baby Boom was well underway. The lucky heroes who managed to survive America’s effort to make the world safe for democracy headed home from far-off shores, seeking a swell girl that they could marry (no cohabitation in those days), and then settle down and raise a family with.
The overwhelming desire to achieve some kind of normalcy was not particularly surprising. This was a generation that was snakebit from the start, humbled and thwarted by a Great Depression that arose roughly as many of these kids of the Greatest Generation were just starting high school. And then, as if poverty and failure weren’t enough, our friends in Japan and Europe decided to reprise the First World War, so off went the young guys—and some young gals—to bail the entire world out once again. How easy we forget.
In any event, that Great Depression generation of Americans—at least those who made it to 1945 in one piece—were more than ready for home and hearth, not to mention getting an actual job that didn’t require a military uniform. Starting marriage and parenthood relatively late in life, they were all ready to have, at last, a calm, tranquil domestic life.
They’d already been battered enough throughout most of their lives by Wall Street robber barons, utility monopolies, and international criminals and kleptocrats who still hadn’t heard that mass murder, plunder, and world domination had fallen out of fashion. They’d had enough adventures. It was time to settle down, lie low, and savor life a bit. We Boomers thought they were incredibly boring and unimaginative as parents, not to mention more than a bit oppressive and didactic. Little did we appreciate the twin economic and military hells they’d survived.
All of which starts inching us toward a discussion of that classic Christmas song, Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas.
Up close and personal
As a former choirboy, sometime pianist, stalwart (but un-degreed) former music director of a large church choir and a handbell choir—not to mention my 15-year stint as music critic for the Washington Times print newspaper—it’s clear that music has held a central position throughout much of my life. Unfortunately, however, one generally can’t make a living by entertaining people. So, like countless others, I’ve earned most of my living in other precincts, most of which aren’t nearly so enjoyable as making music.
Chalk the music thing up to my post-WWII upbringing in good old Cleveland, Ohio, variously the Mistake-on-the-Lake or The Best Location in the Nation, once briefly America’s Second City before sinking into permanent oblivion in the 1960s and beyond, largely due to political and public employee union corruption that still makes Chicago seem like a bunch of amateurs and poseurs.
Back in the day, though, Cleveland was also a city that launched tens of thousands of postwar Boomers into the known universe. Fiancés and husbands alike returned from the Second War to End All Wars ready to get to work building the American economy by making stuff from steel and by cranking out more kids than the Social Security system would ultimately be prepared to handle. How quaint this all seems today, when we’ve outsourced the bulk of this work to a country that would love to bury us.
Highly ethnic, Catholic, and religious, the average Clevelander’s yearly high point was the area’s annual celebration of Christmas, a holiday you could actually proclaim in public without fearing public humiliation, Federal charges, civil lawsuits, or arrest.
Christmas lights were mounted outside houses with a vengeance. The Christmas light frenzy was particularly vehement on Cleveland’s near West Side, extending to the far-flung suburbs lining Lake Erie on this, the unfashionable working class part of the city.
For us, the lights were most impressive along Clifton and Lake in the near-western suburb of Lakewood, whose light displays dazzled all who drifted by in one flavor or another of Buick, Pontiac, or Chevrolet, all of which shamelessly guzzled leaded gasoline. But at less than 29 cents per gallon, cruising the Christmas lights was still a cheap date or an enjoyable family outing.
In addition to all those lights, the holiday music was everywhere. As befitted Cleveland’s onetime status as a major entertainment venue—currently “in transition” Euclid Avenue was once America’s second “Great White Way”—big and little bands were still in vogue, and Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were still the Greatest Generation’s musical gods, even though that irritating and vaguely immoral spectre of rock-‘n-roll was lurking ever more boldly in the alleyways and inside cigarette smoke-filled neighborhood clubs, dives, and bars.
All this, of course, would eventually be immortalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But that was still in the future.
My own mother was a big band—correction, a territory band—singer before she was married. She traveled the middle-America circuit with the George Duffy band and one or two others, wandering like a gang of gifted pop minstrels (original definition) from city to city, with their Western and Eastern territory parameters vaguely defined by Milwaukee and Washington, DC.
Oddly, perhaps as a result of a 1947 gig at Washington’s old Statler Hilton (now the Capitol Hilton) where the Duffy band played when in town, the parental units got hitched at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, although they never actually lived here as a couple. A little over a year later, yours truly first graced the world with his presence, on Christmas Eve, wouldn’t ya know.
May all your Christmases be white…
With all this big band overhead hanging around the house, it ultimately turned out that, instead of rock, I grew up on 1930s and 1940s classics performed live in the family kitchen or on the turntable of our unstable 45 RPM record player. And without a doubt, no Christmas song was more ubiquitous at that time than Bing Crosby’s rendition (probably his second recorded one) of Irving Berlin’s immortal “White Christmas.” Every family, it seemed, had their own copy, not just ours.
Composed by Berlin in the 1930s, the song began to catch on when it was featured in the 1942 film “Holiday Inn” starring Der Bingle and the fleet-of-foot Fred Astaire. (And yes, Virginia, the film gave birth to the name of the eponymous hotel chain that remains with us still.)
Crosby’s later single of the song helped blast it to the top of the charts in those halcyon, pre-Elvis days. Except in those days there weren’t any charts to speak of.
At any rate, to capitalize on the song’s continuing popularity, Hollywood trotted out and revised the script of “Holiday Inn,” giving this film retread a military backstory and setting the bulk of the action in a small inn-resort-B&B in rural Vermont circa 1954.
For this updated remake, Bing was coaxed back to reprise his previous starring role. Astaire turned down the new offer, however. His replacement, song and dance man Donald O’Connor managed to sustain an injury. So Crosby’s sidekick ended up being the quirky but very capable Danny Kaye instead. And of course, the film’s key song remained the eponymous “White Christmas,” that never-ending, sentimental Christmas smash that was gifted to Christians everywhere by a popular Jewish songsmith. What a country!
“White Christmas” remains a favorite even today, defying current popular tastes with its hushed, sentimental reverence for those wondrous family Christmases from the distant past—the Christmases we all remember with fondness even though most of them ended up being not really quite so wonderful if the truth were told. In any event, this song helped us believe what we fervently wanted to believe, and none of us ever saw much that was wrong with that.
In “White Christmas,” both Berlin’s tune and lyrics drip with a wonderful, warm, idyllic kind of nostalgia, making listeners long for an almost impossible ideal of holiday camaraderie, family closeness, and peace on earth, whether they’re Democrats, Republicans, or Wal-Mart patrons. Irving sure knew how to press all the right buttons, that’s for sure.
Personally, “White Christmas” remains one of my favorites. And happily, unlike most stuff I favor in life, I’m not alone on this one. The Guinness Book of World Records has declared “White Christmas” the best-selling single of all time, with sales estimated to be north of 50 million copies throughout the world. Yeah, okay, some Elton John fans pooh-pooh this number, claiming Elton’s “Candle in the Wind” has sold more copies.
But in sheer, verifiable numbers, including sales logged before formal pop record records were kept, Der Bingle’s Christmas single still rules. Sorry rock fans, go figure. Crosby’s 1949 Christmas album, which includes the song, has never been out of print, an astounding achievement. I’ve got one on my shelf. Bet a lot of you do, too. Radiohead and the ghost of Nirvana should be so lucky.
Here’s a link to Crosby’s performance of Berlin’s song that occurs the early going of the 1954 film “White Christmas.” It occurs at the outset of the film, with Crosby navigating a cheap, makeshift GI stage on the edge of an anonymous European battlefield. Stage left, a soldier cranks out a pathetic, patched-together accompaniment on some kind of hurdy-gurdy, music box contraption.
Listen carefully. You’ll hear the sound of shells faintly exploding in the far distance as Bing’s soldier-audience falls somber and silent, chilled to the bone and thinking only about home and how much they long to be there. The video is a little blurry, but you’ll quickly get the picture. I would think that returning Iraq and Afghanistan War vets will seriously relate even if they’ve never seen the movie or have somehow never heard the song.
Both the film and the song bring back those thrilling days of yesteryear when most Americans actually professed to have most of their values in common with one another and fervently believed that the United States had been blessed by God and good fortune no matter what anyone else in the world said. What a concept. We might want to consider finding our way back to this America in 2012.
Meanwhile, Merry Christmas to all!
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