White Christmas

[Mark A. Mandel]

        [AM, 12 Dec:]
Its origins are probably Old World, given the old saying that a green
Christmas means a full churchyard.  It must have arisen in contrast to the
notion that a healthier season would need enough winter weather by
Christmastime to arrest some diseases.

        [MAM, 31 Dec, catching up:]
Its origins are probably Old World, given the old saying that a green
Christmas means a full churchyard.  It must have arisen in contrast to the
notion that a healthier season would need enough winter weather by
Christmastime to arrest some diseases.

        [AM, 31 Dec:]
I asumed we were talking about something more than just an expression that
could  as easily have been about shoes or rooftops. "White Christmas"  as a
hoped-for event, as in the Berlin song: a cultural trope.

        [MAM again now, realtime, 1 Jan; happy New Year, all!:]

Well, it's clearly hoped-for in the Berlin song, but not in any of the
antedates to that in John Baker's post that started this thread (below).

 - The New Yorker cartoon (actually from 1932, annotated "Perry Barlow
(12/24/1932)", number 789 on the CD) could well be hopeful,
 - but the 1878 cite is if anything negative in affect.
 - And to my mind all the positive affect in the 1874 cite comes from the
surrounding words, "clean... pure and crisp": "white" is simply literal.

(By the way, Berlin seems to have written the song in 1940, not 1937, and
the movie that made it famous, "Holiday Inn", was released in 1942.
<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=850892> .
 The fuzzy sheet-music image at
<http://www.sheetmusicplus.com/store/smp_inside.html?cart=10120306010&item=3772132&page=01>
seems to say at the bottom "Copyright 1940, 1942 by Irving Berlin".)

Which brings me back to my question: Is there any clear sense of "white
Christmas" as a cultural trope, a hoped-for event, prior to the Berlin song?
The evidence has dwindled to one cartoon caption. And if not -- or even if
so -- what need is there to derive it by opposition from the mid-19c ominous
"green Christmas"?

-- Mark A. Mandel

        --------------- QUOTED FROM ARCHIVE -----------------

Date:         Mon, 12 Dec 2005 13:02:53 -0500
From: "Baker, John" <JMB at STRADLEY.COM>
Subject: White Christmas
Comments: To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

        How old is "white Christmas"?  The phrase's current popularity,
of course, derives from the 1937 Irving Berlin song, but he did not coin
it.  In Nancy: A Novel, by Rhoda Broughton (1874) (via Making of
America), we read "It is Christmas-day - a clean white Christmas, pure
and crisp."

        That 1874 quotation, with "white" mixed in with other
adjectives, made me wonder if the usage was the same as our standardized
term.  There's no doubt about this example from 1878, from Appletons'
Journal (Dec. 1878) (also via Making of America):  "Once she lifted the
closed curtain and looked out; snow was still falling.  It was to be a
white Christmas, and people had said all day that if the storm did not
abate by nightfall there could be few carols sung this year."

        "White Christmas" still had currency when Berlin wrote the song.
>From the 12/24/1934 New Yorker (reprinted in The Complete New Yorker):
"For once, it looks like we might have a white Christmas."  This is the
caption of a cartoon; the speaker is the father of an African-American
family, looking out the window.

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