The hidden history of 'White Christmas' [View all]

The hidden history of 'White Christmas'
December 15, 202512:00 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered
Anastasia Tsioulcas

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/15/nx-s1-5628363/white-christmas-bing-crosby-history?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us


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Songwriter Irving Berlin wasn't destined to be a Yuletide magic maker. He was born Israel Baline in Siberia to an Orthodox Jewish family; his father was a cantor turned kosher butcher. But Berlin embraced assimilation — he married an Irish Catholic woman and had Christmas trees in his house. Even so, for Berlin, Christmas was a holiday shadowed by personal tragedy.

"On Christmas Day, 1928, his only son died. He always told members of his family that he disliked Christmas for this reason, that he could never, never get past the sadness that he experienced on Christmas Day," said author and New York Times contributing writer Jody Rosen, who wrote a book called White Christmas: The Story of an American Song.

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But there's other stuff going on, too. Irving Berlin was a hit machine as a Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter. As a New Yorker and an immigrant himself, he was intimately familiar with a particular genre of songs, Rosen said: "That tradition of so-called 'home songs,' you know, songs that pine for a lost place, a lost ideal. These songs are so huge because we have an immigrant population, lots of people who've done a lot of moving. So there were songs about Irish people longing for Ireland and Italians longing for the old country there."

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He said Berlin took that genre and flipped it into a Christmas song.That's especially true of a largely forgotten, tongue-in-cheek introductory verse Berlin originally wrote for "White Christmas." The narrator is a New Yorker stuck in California (as Berlin frequently was, churning out songs for Hollywood.) "The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway…but it's December the 24th, and I am longing to be up north!" the protagonist sings.

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The rest of the story speaks to racism, and is well worth the read.

This story was edited for radio and digital by Jennifer Vanasco.