I’m Dreaming of an American Christmas

White Christmas (1954) has been part of family Christmases for as long as I can remember.

Bing Crosby’s voice is wonderful, but his middle-age-man-playing-hip hasn’t worn well over the years. Danny Kaye’s cracked-voice nervousness, his silly humor, and his surprisingly skillful dancing still work. Like all musicals, the film is thin on plot. It’s schmaltzy, light entertainment, a mid-century Hollywood specialty

Irving Berlin’s songs are catchy, sometimes clever. The title song had already won an Academy Award (for Holiday Inn , 1942). Wikipedia cites that other great authoritative text, Guinness, in support of the claim that it’s the best-settling single of all time, and NPR made it #2 on its list of Songs of the Century back in 1999, second to “Over the Rainbow.”

Though entirely a Christmas film, White Christmas has no references to Jesus or His birth. No character even alludes to Christ. The soldiers at the front in the opening scene don’t sing any Christmas carols, and the film’s score doesn’t have even a few bars of a carol either. It’s quite an astonishing achievement: an utterly Christless Christmas film.

In place of Jesus, we get a mash of mid-century Americanism. There snow, and Christmas cards, glistening treetops, and sleigh bells in the snow, and nostalgia for the Christmases I used to know. There are good, altruistic deeds, done out of loyalty to an old friend, and from beginning to end the film glows with the warmth of post-World War II patriotism. If there’s a faith here, it’s a gospel of small-town American and faith in the decency of the American military.

Whatever one thinks of those sentiments, they don’t constitute a gospel.