White Christmas: Saving the Best of the Past

Christmas Movies, #2

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A Very American Christmas

Christmas in America is a relatively recent phenomenon. Our Puritan progenitors weren’t big on holidays of any sort—holidays encouraged disorder, and bore the whiff of paganism.¹ Their Quaker neighbors were more-or-less on the same page.² Turns out that if you’re willing to load your children on a wooden boat and cross the ocean in order to get away from sinful neighbors you’re likely to have a temperament that bends toward the dour and severe.

On the other hand, when people are generally free to do their own thing, they do—and, for most people, “their own thing” includes making the world into what they want (and kicking a serious amount of ass as they do so). People that kick ass usually like to enjoy the fruits of their labor, which invariably means finding reasons to have parties—thus, even many of the descendants of these over-serious Protestants eventually lightened up and had some wintery fun.

Christmas horned its way onto the new continent, first as a Bacchanal, and then—as the Irish and other majority-Catholic populations made their way to the New World—as a religious or quasi-religious festival of contemplation and hope.

By the late nineteenth century, the Christmas traditions of German, Irish, Scottish, English, Italian, Nordic, and Dutch immigrants (from high and low classes) started to bleed together into what we now know as American Christmas. A time of Yule logs, holly, wreaths, decorated evergreen trees, and genuine American originals such as Santa Claus, who was conjured up out of the fevered poetic vision of Clement Clarke Moore³ and the advertising genius of the world’s most successful branding enterprise: Coca Cola.⁴

It all started with the art of Haddon Sundblom in the 1930s

The result is the tradition we all know—a pagan solstice festival woven together with the Christian nativity story and focused on that American holy trinity of community, family, and commercialism.

Am I Dreaming?

The classic Irving Berlin musical extravaganza White Christmas, released in 1954, tells the tale of a pair of World War Two veterans who wind up joined-at-the-hip as a post-war vaudeville act that makes good. Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) and Phil Davis (Danny Kaye) enjoy a meteoric rise to the top of the New York variety show circuit, becoming regular producers on the off-Broadway scene. As the Christmas break approaches for their traveling variety show, they take a free evening to do a favor for an old Army buddy. They head to a Miami night club to see the buddy’s sisters put on a song-and-dance routine.

Judy Haynes (Vera-Ellen) has, it turns out, forged the request by their brother to get Wallace and Davis to check them out, which her sister Betty (Rosemary Clooney) finds scandalous. She is dismayed to learn that Bob admires Judy for the subterfuge, as Betty has already started taking a shine to him.

Phil, who has been trying to fix Bob up with a lady in order to give Bob something to do other than running Phil ragged, notices the sexual tension between Bob and Betty and arranges for the sisters to wind up on the same northbound train as the showmen. During the trip, Phil and the girls talk Bob into changing his Christmas plans, and the newly-minted foursome aims for Vermont, where the girls are booked into a resort as the Christmas entertainment.

Upon arriving at the resort, they discover that it’s run by Bob and Phil’s old commanding officer, General Waverly. They also discover that he’s on the verge of bankruptcy—without a successful tourist season, he’s going to lose the resort into which he’s invested his life savings and his military pension. And, unfortunately, it’s a hot dry winter in Vermont, with nary a snow flake in sight.

Bob and Phil decide to re-call their employees from Christmas vacation and put them to work headlining the General’s resort, with the first show to play on Christmas eve. They tell the General that they’re just looking for rehearsal space, so he might as well reap a benefit from giving them a deal on the use of his stage. With this face-saving move, they set their diabolically sweet plan in motion.

Unfortunately, the General is getting itchy feet. He wants a life where his actions actually yield results, and with an unspecified foreign war⁵ hotting up he’s petitioned the Pentagon to restore him to active duty and give him a field command in-theater. When the letter comes from Washington, Bob is present to watch the General read a note telling him, very gently, that he’s passed his sell-by date and he needs to just accept old age with grace.

Bob, seeing the devastation in his old C.O.’s face, resolves to give the old man the best Christmas present ever. As his budding romance with Betty crumbles due to the meddling of Phil, Judy, and others, Bob lights out for New York City to go on a stand-in for the Ed Sullivan show and beg all the Veterans in the New England area who had previously served under the General to show up to the resort and remind the General that he was still remembered with honor and affection.

Christmas eve arrives. Betty, impressed with the gesture, comes back into the fold and surprises Bob by appearing on stage next to him. The General is manipulated into attending in uniform, to find his theater filled to bursting with soldiers likewise in uniform. The show opens with a special tribute to him and, as the pageant unfolds, the snow starts to fall. Bob and Phil both find themselves engaged to their preferred Haynes sister, and the lodge is saved.

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American Significance

White Christmas is, like other Christmas films of its era (such as The Lemon Drop Kid, Miracle on 34th Street, and It’s a Wonderful Life) focused on the intersection of commercialism and community, which was then a hot topic in American life. Post-war prosperity was fragmenting American life, but the memory of World War Two was still strong and a sense of America as a unified, solid entity ran deep in the cultural bones.

The film finds its Christmas meaning in the work of successful small businessmen using their success to enrich their community, explicitly repudiating the notion that a savvy businessperson might exploit the misfortunes he encounters to enrich his own station. The optimistic tone stands, within the film, in stark contrast to the advertising-drenched consumerism that was, even then, perceptibly eroding American culture.

In that context, the film’s focus on the value of community might seem almost banal, but a few interesting features (beyond it’s stunning production values, choreography, and performances) make it stand out from the schmaltzy fare that typified most of its contemporaries.

First, White Christmas is a showcase for the musical work of American legend Irving Berlin, an immigrant Russian Jew whose family fled the Czar when he was a mere tyke, who made his entire career writing songs about his love of his new homeland. He was one of the defining voices of Tin Pan Alley,⁶ and his music shaped American pop culture in the first half of the twentieth century more profoundly than follow-up acts like Elvis Presley or The Doors. His anthem God Bless America is still a favorite of highly patriotic Americans all across the country.

The ideal of America as a land of self-reliant communities defied by those who put their fellow man before a quick buck—without ever disdaining entrepreneurship—is one that exemplified the spirit of Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, and the ideals of the generation that marched off to meet their deaths in Europe and the Pacific.

Vaudeville. There’s a word you don’t hear anymore. Once upon a time, in the days before television, the Vaudeville theater circuit criss-crossed America. Vaudeville pre-dated movies, and competed with movies in the early decades of film. These were the incubators of such uniquely American artforms as burlesque (which splintered off into its own competing theatrical circuit long before it devolved into just a form of strip-teases), barbershop quartets, stand-up comedy, and the song-and-dance acts that would eventually merge with opera to create the American version of musical theater. Just about every funky trope you see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon—from theatrical drag acts to wild impressions—is pulled straight from the Vaudeville stages of the early twentieth century. White Christmas is a paean to the then-dying Vaudeville era.

Second, like most great works of art, the different plot and thematic elements resonate powerfully with one another. This film about a community forged in difficulty is, itself, a love letter to a community forged in difficulty. And that includes several loving tributes to the history of that community.

The bulk of the runtime of White Christmas is made up of the elaborate musical numbers performed at rehearsals for the Wallace and Davis show, and these numbers have, in recent years, generated the occasional tempest-in-a-teapot among those on the Internet who live for offense. The raucous, cacophonous number Choreography features an orientalist theme, with Danny Kaye performing in half-hearted yellowface with Vera-Ellen, who performs the film’s most intense dance sequence.

Moderately embarrassing product of its time, right? And yet, such a fantastic production!⁷

But Vaudeville wasn’t America’s original theatrical form, it was American theater’s second generation. It owed its existence to Jews who wanted to make their way in a new homeland that didn’t have much place for them, so they joined the ranks of the first form of American traveling musical theater companies…

…the ones who performed Minstrel Shows.

Minstrel arose in the nineteenth century, and its major acts were blackface routines performed by white actors and—less commonly remembered⁸—whiteface routines performed by black actors.

Blackface is a very particular form of theater⁹—you have to do a lot more than just paint brown skin onto a white actor to get blackface. In blackface, the white actor’s face is painted coal-black, except for the lips and sometimes the areas around the eyes. This yielded a cartoonish distortion of the African skull structure that was visible from the back of dimly-lit theaters (whiteface featured the exact inverse paint job).

Al Jolsen, 1930

The Minstrel show blackface and whiteface routines were dominated by broad sketch comedies, with each race lampooning the easily-parodied and mock characteristics of the other.¹⁰ These routines are ill-remembered (and even demonized) in the post-civil rights era, but at the time they were—believe it or not—positively progressive. They brought black performers and a (often cruel) parody of black culture to white audiences, and vice versa. They provided a venue for social race-mixing, and an opportunity to blow off inter-racial tension in the spirit of humor and sportsmanship (by letting the races do what the Brits call “taking the piss” out of each other), and fostered enough goodwill between the races that prominent blackface performers—such as Al Jolson (pictured above)—were often outspoken civil rights activists.¹¹

These shows influenced American artistic culture at a level that is impossible to escape. You can find blackface-inspired performances preserved in films like Dumbo (the sequence with the crows), in the character design of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, in the early antics of Daffy Duck, and a thousand other seminal theatrical and animated works.¹²

Which brings us to the spicy part of White Christmas. In its determination to honor the entirety of the American theater tradition, pride-of-place is given to a musical number called Minstrel Show. It comes near the mid-point of the film, and is the most elaborately-staged musical number in the entire production. It is the thematic centerpiece of the movie, and every year it seems to provoke a new round of hastily-scribbled formulaic articles condemning the racism of Irving Berlin’s musical masterpiece.¹³

This great source of performative Internet consternation also shines light on a part of the American consciousness that seems in danger of being forgotten in these darkening latter days:

Celebrating the best of the past, and passing it on to the future.

The tropes of the Minstrel Show are dated now. We in the twenty-first century don’t have access to the kind of racial tension and national ferment that gave birth to the Minstrel Show. We don’t even understand the stereotypes referenced, pulled as they are from the mannerisms of now-extinct groups of Americans (freed slaves and sharecroppers on one hand, and Yankee carpetbaggers on the other).

But we do still have stand-up comedy. And song-and-dance routines. And musicals. And sketch comedy. And broad-comedy buskers. And variety shows.

Early television and film were made by the antics of performers who got their start in Minstrel, Vaudeville, and Burlesque. Even that most American of dramatic forms, the sitcom, descends from these roots.¹⁴

Honor and Succession

And this is what sets White Christmas apart from its contemporaries among both Christmas movies and musical spectacles:

At all levels it honors the giants whose shoulders we stand on. Whether it’s the Old Man Tom Waverly who retired with honors from the field of battle and longs for one last fight, or the old friend whose sisters need a hand up in their career, or the artistic traditions that make the film itself possible, it shows an American spirit that is determined to build. The old generations pass away, and we who inherit are left to build the world for our children by plucking and preserving the best of what we are given, adding to it, and then handing it on.

The story begins with the ending of a great war and the beginning of a great peace. It ends with the snow-drenched dwindling of an old year on the cusp of a new, with characters putting away old lives—of bachelorhood, of fondly-remembered military glory, of always-forward-looking optimism—and starting afresh on new adventures of retirement, family, and a song that remembers the quiet joys of past White Christmases that may yet haunt the future with their beauty.

May your days be merry and bright—and may your Christmas fill your world with light.

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1. No joke: one could be charged with a crime and fined if one celebrated Christmas in Puritan America.

2. The outwardly distinguishing feature of Quakerism is a disdain for all ritual—traditional Quakers don’t party, don’t dance, don’t celebrate high holy days, and don’t even re-enact the Eucharist (a ritual common to almost all other Christian sects).

3. You know the poem:
’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…
You can refresh your memory here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Visit_from_St._Nicholas

4. Moore was drawing on older European legends of St. Nicholas—himself originally a Greek Christian bishop from the 4th century who was, in folkore, blended over the centuries with gods such as Bran the Blessed (his cauldron of plenty is one of the potential origins for Santa Claus’s magic toy sack) , Odin, and Father Christmas. Moore drew mainly Germanic and Scandinavian versions of this myth, while Coca Cola took Moore’s version of the figure, added the Coca-Cola colors (red and white), and gave us the figure we now know as Santa Claus.

5. White Christmas was released in the immediate aftermath of the Korean war and is heavily nostalgic—it is implied, but never stated, that this is the war Waverly wants to serve in.

6. An area in New York City where songwriters gathered to work, and music publishing companies set up shop. Between the 1880s and the 1950s, it was the scene in the U.S. where music was concerned. Several latter-day rock savants, such as Neil Diamond, got early traction in the fading days of Tin Pan Alley.

7. This part of the article originally credited the choreography of Choreography (and the rest of the film) to a a pre-fame Bob Fosse. A weather-eyed reader informed me that my source on this was incorrect and directed me to the real dope. Robert Alton choreographed everything in the film. You can read about it here: https://artsmeme.com/2020/08/14/more-on-robert-altons-choreography-from-white-christmas-1954/

8. Also less commonly featured.

9. You can see a representative routine during the Abraham musical number in the earlier Bing Crosby/Irving Berlin collaboration, Holiday Inn.

10. This is not to say there weren’t also poignant and tragic routines—there were, and some of them got quite famous. But, comic or tragic, Minstrel was a kind of pantomime—broad, brash, and campy. Drag acts are modern descendants of the Minstrel show in both kind and tone.

11. Al Jolson performed in blackface in the first ever sync-sound film, The Jazz Singer (1927). The 1980 remake starring Neil Diamond featured an update of the trope that highlighted the similarities and tensions between conservative Jewish artists and black artists.

12. For more recent productions, you can see Robert Downey Jr. perform in anti-blackface in Tropic Thunder, where he “blacks up” and plays a white actor whose strength and nobility derives entirely from the blackness of his in-movie character.

13. No, I’m not going to link to them. You can find them easily with any search engine.

14. Though it also owes a debt to Oscar Wilde. The arts world is a complicated place.