The Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us

By Harold Meyerson

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. He spent his first five Christmases in czarist Russia, and his only recollection of that time, at least the only one he'd acknowledge as an adult, was that of watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.

So 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 Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. It's just that Berlin's religion was America.



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Now the Fox News demagogues want to impose a more sectarian Christmas on us, supplanting the distinctly American holiday we have celebrated lo these threescore years with 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?



more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/20/AR2005122001011.html

And I mean that both seriously and facetiously!

Christmas is a season, as well as the de facto celebration of a great man's birth (even if it isn't on His actual birthday), and can be celebrated by Christians and those good men and women who just enjoy the season - in the white, fluffy and even secular Irvin Berlin intended.