I didn’t expect a white Christmas in Northern Virginia this morning, and there wasn’t one. It’s a good thing too: a snow-covered vista would have probably made me cry, and that’s been happening too often this holiday season. (My mother, who made up Christmas traditions and legends as an avocation, once told my sister and me that it was bad luck for the whole year to come if you cried on Christmas.) The song “White Christmas” is supposed to make you cry, however, or at least get a bit misty.

I co-wrote two Christmas revues for my late, lamented (by me, anyway) professional theater company in Arlington, Virginia, The American Century Theater. The most popular of the two was called “If Only In My Dreams,” taken from the lyrics of another wistful Christmas song, “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” by lyricist Kim Gannon and composer Walter Kent and introduced by Bing Crosby in 1943. The show was constructed around the letters written by GIs overseas during World War II to their families or  girlfriends as Christmas loomed, alternating those stories with narration and the popular Christmas songs of the period.

The most famous and important of these songs was, of course, “White Christmas.” Bing Crosby’s version was the best selling single record of all time for half a century. When Irving Berlin handed the song over to the musician who transcribed his melodies (Irv could not read music and composed by ear, just like another brilliant and prolific tune-smith, Paul McCartney), he  famously announced that he had written, not just the best song he had ever written, but the best song that anyone had ever written. 

Crosby crooned the song in the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” and it made him the face and voice of Christmas for the rest of his life. The piece was the centerpiece of Bing’s 1947 “White Christmas” album of Christmas songs, the best-selling Christmas album of all time; it was covered by every singer with a pulse (and still is); it was used to create the film “White Christmas,” a movie staple of the season; and served as the climax of too many Crosby TV Christmas specials to count. The song probably (you never know) ensures that Bing and Irving will be remembered long after “Going My Way,” the “Road” movies, “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” have been condemned to the cultural amnesia that awaits us all.

Yet it was not until Berlin’s daughter, writer Mary Ellen Bartlett, published her last book, a memoir of growing up as one of three girls whose father was the most acclaimed songwriter in the U.S.A., that the reason “White Christmas” feels so melancholy finally was revealed. She wrote,

“Though we were Jewish, Christmas for our family was a spectacular holiday, with decorations, presents, songs and celebrations. Yet there was a mystery, for every Christmas Eve my parents went somewhere without us…we never knew where, and they never would discuss it, brushing our questions aside and hinting that their errands had something to do with last minute preparations.

One day, when I was ten years old and  Christmas was approaching , my forbidden search for hidden presents uncovered an old newspaper clipping in my father’s desk. It puzzled me, because it announced that the infant son of Irving Berlin had died, and my sister and I never knew of any other siblings. I showed the clipping to our governess. She was reluctant, but I insisted, and she explained.

There had been a little boy, Irving Berlin Jr, who had been born two years after me.  He had trouble breathing, and after only three weeks, his heart had simply stopped. My parents were devastated, and couldn’t bring themselves to talk about the loss. “You must never mention this to them,” she said. Then I noticed the date on the clipping.

“Where do my parents go on Christmas Eve?” I asked. She looked at me, then revealed the secret that had been withheld from us, that our parents would never tell us themselves, hoping that Christmas would always symbolize joyful times for us, as it once had for them.

“They go to the cemetery, to be with your brother and lay flowers on his grave. He died on Christmas day.”

Ponder the lyrics of the song in that context. A “white Christmas” is a warm, nostalgic, merry Christmas. Berlin is telling us that he remembers when Christmas was like that for him, but knows it will never feel so again. His lost little boy will never  listen for “sleighbells in the snow.” But he wishes for us that all of our days ahead will be merry and bright, and that all of our Christmases are “white.”

Of course, that’s unlikely, if not impossible, as I first discovered myself in 2009, when my father died on December 1 and my mother couldn’t muster a smile on what had always been her favorite day of the year.

There is another “White Christmas” story to remember this season. In 2018, Nathaniel R. Lewis, 34, of East Vincent Township in Pennsylvania, lost his mind on Christmas night: he had separated from his wife just before the holidays, and was mad at the world.  He barricaded himself inside his home and fired shots at eleven police officers with his rifle during a ten hour standoff that began around 7:30 p.m. on Christmas and lasted until  the next morning.

A tragedy seemed inevitable.  Then Lewis shouted to the SWAT team’s negotiator that he would surrender if the negotiator sang”White Christmas” for him. So the officer did his best. True to his word, Lewis  surrendered to police to face 11 charges of attempted homicide of a police officer.

It’s a magic song.

And I’m going to listen to it right now.