Did Palm Trees Really Help Inspire Irving Berlin's "White Christmas"?

Well, I guess we have to take the composer at his word, since he starts out like this:

The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway;
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A.
And I am longing to be up north . .

Those who have studied the matter think that Irving Berlin was in Beverly Hills working on a movie when the original idea for this song came to him. He was separated from his family over Christmas of that year, 1937, and very homesick. Looking at those orange and palm trees and thinking about the snowy New York streets just added to his loneliness, so he wrote down at the least some basic ideas for the song. Interestingly, Berlin couldn’t read or write standard musical notation. He could, however, play the piano by ear and was also a talented singer, having made his living as a singing waiter in his early New York days. He moved on to writing lyrics for songs during the early 1900’s, but at some point he realized that he’d make more money if he could write both words and music. How did he do that without any knowledge of compositional mechanics? He would work out what he wanted for the tune and memorize the result. Then he’d go in to an arranger/collaborator at a music publishing house and get that person to put his song on paper after he played the basic melody on the piano or even whistled it. For his first great hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” published in 1911, the arranger was paid 50 cents a page for taking Berlin’s dictation. (Interesting historical note: Ragtime was very popular at the time, and many “tunesmiths,” as one website called them, were self-taught black composers who also could not read music. So it was very common for music publishers to have staff who were on hand specifically to write down the music. And it’s not all that rare these days for famous musicians/performers to lack the ability to read music, among them Elvis Presley, all four of the Beatles, and Michael Jackson.)

We know that Berlin had a practice of “going to the trunk,” some place where he stored away everything he’d ever written. I guess from the descriptions I’ve read that it truly was a trunk, filled with scraps of paper that he’d scribbled on. For “White Christmas” he went back to that trunk and took out whatever he had written in 1937, re-wrote the lyrics, figured out the tune, and handed the result over to his musical secretary. He reportedly told him, “I’ve just written a new song. Not only is it the best song I’ve ever written, it’s the best song anybody’s ever written.” (By this time Berlin was a huge success and therefore could afford to hire his own personal secretary. The one who stayed with him the longest was a German-born and conservatory-trained musician named Helmy Kresa, who worked with Berlin for over 60 years with time off for “the occasional spat.”)

Christmas didn’t have any religious significance to Berlin, as he was Jewish. “I think,” reflected Linda Emmett, the second of Berlin’s three daughters, “for my father that Christmas was an American holiday more than anything else. It was certainly nothing he was exposed to, to say the least in Russia.” In the Berlin household, she says, Christmas was “the typical secular Christmas, with a Christmas tree, and Christmas stockings, and a turkey, and a plum pudding, and general cheery atmosphere, and something that as children we looked forward to tremendously.” The really fascinating (and sad) fact here is that, while Berlin and his wife obviously made sure that their children enjoyed Christmas, for them personally the holiday was a tragic one. Their three-week-old son had died on December 25, 1928, and every year the two of them visited his grave on that day.

Timing played a part in the immense popularity of the song. It was released on Christmas Day, 1941, just 18 days after the Pearl Harbor attack, airing on Bing Crosby’s radio show. Then, eight months later, it was included in the movie Holiday Inn. But it was when Armed Forces Radio began playing the song, Jody Rosen says in White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, that it really took off. It was 1942, the first winter that American troops had spent overseas. So, these images of a snowy American, New England-y Christmas really spoke to the longing, nostalgia and homesickness of the troops.. It was the enthusiasm of these troops that really propelled the song and made it a hit. Can’t you just see those GI’s, huddled around a radio, listening to the song? I sure can. That image lends even more poignancy to its words.

Here are a couple of performances–first one by the great a cappella group Pentatonix, complete with beat-boxing: