May your Days be Merry and Bright

I’m feeling the need for a classic today, and as I look out my window, watching the snow drift to the ground, I’m thinking about the one day of the year on which everyone--and I mean everyone--wants snow.

Everybody wants a White Christmas.

Most people associate White Christmas  with the movie of the same name, but the song actually debuted in another Bing Crosby film, Holiday Inn {one of my all-time favorites}. Irving Berlin actually wrote the song for the movie after writing Easter Parade. He was approached to write a song for each holiday of the year, and Berlin thought that his Valentine’s Day song Be Careful, It’s my Heart  would be the most popular.

Did you also know that the song White Christmas, which is full of nostalgia, was released 18 days after the attacks on Pearl Harbor? The version that made the song famous, recorded by Bing Crosby, wore out from overuse. That original version of the song, heard by our troops overseas during World War Two, no longer exists.

And did you know that Christmas was a terribly sad day for Irving Berlin? He would spend the day at his son’s grave, who had died on Christmas Day in 1928 when he was only three weeks old.

My favorite version of this song is the first version heard in Holiday Inn. Bing Crosby’s Jim Hardy is singing it with aspiring talent Linda Mason {Marjorie Reynolds} at his unopened Holiday Inn. They sing it in front of a roaring fire, beside a Christmas tree. Later in the film, when Linda has become famous in Hollywood, Jim recreates the scene for her and reminds her of what she left behind. It’s beautiful. I defy you to think different.

I apologize for the quality of the video, but just enjoy this classic melody and dream of your own White Christmas.


~Stay gold!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being Kinda "Knotty"

Image
I have a confession to make. I'm about to bore you to tears. Okay, maybe not literally, but I'm writing about something I find terribly exciting, and there are those of you, dear readers, who may not agree. So I'm giving you an out. Right now, just stop reading. Is anyone still there? Good. Because we're about to get "knotty." I love to knit. There, I said it. If I could do nothing but knit, read, write, and drink tea, I'd be a very contented person. Not exciting, just contented. I've been knitting for a few years now. I wish I could say I learned from my grandmother or something that sounds much better than "I learned from Youtube." Actually, that doesn't sound too bad--Youtube is pretty indispensable when it comes to knitting. You can watch videos of all the stitches, which makes it easier to catch on sometimes. Up until recently, though, my knitting has not been varied. I knit scarves (the essential beginner project). I've
Read more

Who do you think you are?

How much do you know about where you came from?  I'm talking big picture here, not what you know about your home town or state. Genealogically.  Most of us know stories that have been passed down. We know that our grandmother's family has Irish roots, for example, and that our several-greats-grandfather fought in the continental army or that our great-grandmother's cousin just disappeared and there was never any trace of him after the Crash of '29. But how much do we really  know about our ancestors?  I am a bit of a genealogy nut--most of my family seems to be--and I have an ancestry.com account, which has proved most interesting to peruse. But all I know are names and some dates--I don't know anything about the kind of people they were, what they liked or disliked. They had children--were they good parents? Did she have a special recipe that she made at Christmas? Did he have a hobby like whittling or playing the guitar? Were there places she alwa
Read more

Questions: Round 1

In my last post, I asked for questions from my readers. I didn't have ridiculously high expectations--not because I don't have faith in my readers!!! But I know that if I read somebody's blog and they invited me to ask questions, I would be very hesitant to do so. Nobody wants to be first. Nobody wants to think that the blogger (me) is sitting there, laughing out loud at the questions and judging the asker. I get it. I promise I understand. I only had one intrepid reader who gave me some fodder for my blog posts, which is fine. I actually was not surprised by the fact that this reader gave me so many questions to answer. Of course, to understand why, one must go back to our time at ISU when she was working a late shift at the Info Desk in the student center and I was sitting in our dorm room when a Facebook chat window popped up, begging for some kind of question/answer quiz she could take before she died of boredom. Add to that hours and hours of Sporcle quizzes (hence
Read more