By Mark Judge on 12.22.05 @ 12:07AM
A Washington Post columnist takes Irving Berlin hostage in the war on Christmas.
The War on Christmas continues. The latest salvo comes from
Harold Meyerson, a columnist for the Washington Post.
Meyerson attempts to enlist Irving Berlin, author of the song
"White Christmas," to the cause of a secular, nonreligious winter
holiday that has nothing to do with Christ or tradition.
Unfortunately, Meyerson made a significant blunder. He forgot to
consult Irving Berlin himself.
But before getting to Berlin, it's necessary to sum up
Meyerson's point. In his
op-ed, "The Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us," he gives a
short bio of Berlin. The songwriter had spent his first five years
in czarist Russia, where he witnessed his family's home being
burned down in, as Meyerson puts it, "a good old-fashioned,
Jew-hating pogrom" -- one of the few fully accurate things in
Meyerson's piece. Due to trauma, writes Meyerson, "it's no surprise
that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in
1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of
Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of
Christmas imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. It's just
that Berlin's religion was America." Furthermore, the song
celebrates "an idealized winter landscape created for an urban
nation that was busily shipping its young men overseas to fight
Hitler and Japan....'White Christmas,' with its implicit assertion
that we can somehow get back to innocent Eden, found a ready
audience." If that's not enough, Berlin married an Irish Catholic
and raised his kids as Protestants.
Meyerson then delivers the money quote, the heart of his message
and the message of the War on Christmas: "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 these 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."
Nonsense. It would have done Meyerson a world of good to check
the archives of his own newspaper -- specifically the December 19,
1954 edition of the Post, which published the piece "The
Christmas I Can't Forget." It's an interview with Berlin himself
about the origin of "White Christmas." While Berlin did indeed
avoid talking about his early years in Russia, he did remember
growing up in New York:
"I was a little Russian-born kid, son of an Orthodox
rabbi, living on the lower East Side of New York City. I did not
have a Christmas. But I bounded across the street to my friendly
neighbors, the O'Haras, and shared their goodies. Not only that,
this was my first sight of a Christmas tree...to me that first tree
seemed to tower to heaven. I was so grateful to the O'Haras and all
my other Gentile neighbors who kept inviting me in to share their
Christmas on the following Hanukkah, which is the Jewish Feast of
Lights when we exchange gifts...It delights me now to learn that
many of our public schools have an interfaith program in which each
student enjoys and respects the religious holidays of the other
fellow. But in those early days we did this anyway, as in the words
of my song, 'doin' what comes naturally.'"
Berlin goes on to explain how, in 1944, he finally realized the
meaning of the song he had written. He was in New Guinea promoting
the film This Is the Army. At a couple minutes after
midnight, when Christmas Eve became Christmas day, a GI arose and
led the troops in "a song for Irving Berlin." They sang "White
Christmas." Berlin: "As the men sang, I understood for the first
time the words I'd written for the song....I knew then that I had
written a melody and a message meaning more than the symbolism of
snow and sleigh bells."
Unlike Meyerson, Berlin gets it. Christmas is more than snow and
sleigh bells -- and Easter is more than walking down Fifth Avenue.
It is about selflessness. It's about making the stranger and
outsider welcome. It is about joy and about hope. It is, in short,
about the message of the gospel. It is about the revolution that
came to the world with the arrival of Jesus Christ -- a revolution
and a message that one not need be Christian to understand, embrace
and want to spread.
At the end of his column, Meyerson takes a cheap shot at "the
Fox News demagogues" who "want to impose a more sectarian
Christmas," 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?"
Where Berlin came from is a New York neighborhood full of
Christians who did not dilute the Christianity of Christmas, but
lived out the imperative of the holiday by warmly welcoming a young
Jewish immigrant to celebrate with them.
topics:
Religion, Russia
