“White Christmas” might be the best-selling Christmas song ever, but the song’s backstory has less to do with tidings of comfort and joy than it does with the tragedy of loss and war.
Written by composer Irving Berlin, the iconic tune is best known for the beloved 1942 version sung by Bing Crosby, though it has been covered by many other artists through the decades.
The melancholy melody and wistful lyrics were considered to make up a nostalgic song reflecting on Christmases past — but in reality, Berlin didn’t even celebrate Christmas: He was a Russian-born Jewish man who came to America as a child.
For Berlin, the holiday season carried the memory of his son, who died at just three weeks old on Christmas Day in 1928. The songwriter visited his son’s grave each year while other families spent time with each other and opened gifts around the Christmas tree.
The song was initially written for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, but Crosby first performed the song on a radio show sponsored by the Kraft Company on Christmas Day 1941 — just 18 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
While the song conveyed a more secular approach to the holiday season than other Christmas songs at the time, it still rose to popularity over the next year as young American troops got deployed for World War II. The Christmas tune went on to be played on the Armed Forces radio to comfort troops overseas as it became an anthem of hope.
Crosby traveled across the globe to perform for the troops and found that “White Christmas” was his most highly requested song, even though he apparently hesitated to perform it due to the soldiers’ reaction to it.
“Heaven knows, I didn’t come that far to make them sad. For this reason, several times I tried to cut it out of the show, but these guys just hollered for it,” the singer once said in an interview.
Crosby’s nephew, Howard Crosby, told the Spokesman-Review in 2016: “I once asked Uncle Bing about the most difficult thing he ever had to do during his entertainment career. He didn’t have to think about it. He said in December, 1944, he was in a USO show with Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters. They did an outdoor show in northern France.”
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He continued, “At the end of the show, he had to stand there and sing ‘White Christmas’ with 100,000 G.I.’s in tears without breaking down himself. Of course, a lot of those boys were killed in the Battle of the Bulge a few days later.”
“White Christmas” went on to be one of the best-selling songs of all time, with over 50 million copies sold worldwide. At Berlin’s suggestion, the song even directly inspired the 1954 film White Christmas, which starred Crosby and featured him singing the song. The Guinness Book of World Records named it the best-selling physical single of all time in 2012.
The song’s 1942 master recording, which was the version heard by the troops, wore out from overuse and had to be remade in 1947. However, a 1942 remaster was released in 1999 and is available today.
