Jack’s show for Christmas Day deals with a song written in the year of Jack’s birth: 1940. The song is called “White Christmas,” and it was composed by a man whose given name was Israel Isidore Ballin–Irving Berlin. How was it that a Russian Jewish immigrant came to write one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time? Does Christ have anything to do with “White Christmas”? The show begins,
On Christmas Eve, my father had to work late at his Western Union office. We had a tree and there were presents, but I couldn’t open them until he returned. The excitement was always intense. It was a mixture of desire, love, greed, astonishment. There are people who tell children that if they are good, they will receive Christmas presents, but if they are not good–if they don’t do what adults want them to do–they will not. This has always seemed to me a betrayal of the spirit of Christmas. Christ is the “gift,” but he does not give of himself because mankind has been good. He gives of himself because mankind has been wicked and can no longer find any means of salvation. He gives of himself because mankind has been bad and has not obeyed the great authority figure. Christmas is one of the primary means of uniting the Old and the New Testaments, and the figure in whom it centers is not God the Father but God the Son. I too was a son.
Thirty years earlier, sometime in the early 1920s, my father stood on a stage somewhere outside of New York City and sang Irving Berlin’s song, “All By Myself.” He was stunned to discover he had stopped the show. He understood himself to be a good tap dancer but only a fair singer. “It wasn’t my singing,” he explained later. “The people there had never heard that song. It was the song they were applauding.”
Many of Irving Berlin’s songs cause a sense of wonder and amazement—a sense that an enormously familiar, even trite sentiment is being presented in a totally unexpected way. “What care I who makes the laws of a nation,” Berlin wrote in 1929—paraphrasing Arius, perpetrator of the Arian Heresy, who said, “Let me make a people’s songs and I care not who makes their laws”—
Let those who will take care of its rights and wrongs
What care I who cares
For the world’s affairs
As long as I can sing its popular songs.
Unfortunately, as Irving Berlin became an all-too-familiar cultural figure—first an icon, then a dinosaur—that quality vanished. The songs became that terrible word: standards. There they “stood,” announcing to everyone their “excellence”—these are “good” songs, like them!—and their energy wasted away. If the early Irving Berlin celebrated “Satan”– “Satan’s melodies makes you want to dance forever, / And you never have to go to bed at all”–the later Irving Berlin seemed to be an embodiment of Respectability. The demonic energy which fueled his early songs and made the composer an often extraordinarily difficult person (when the Allies bombed Berlin, one of Berlin’s rival songwriters remarked, “They bombed the wrong Berlin”) this demonic energy stepped aside and took up its abode in the young, the teenaged, the rebellious, the “simple-minded.” Irving Berlin couldn’t stand rock ’n roll, and rock ’n roll didn’t give a damn about Irving Berlin. “You’ll be doin’ all right,” crooned Elvis with just a hint of a tear and a snarl in his voice, “with your Christmas of white, but I’ll have a blue—blue blue blue—Christmas.” When Elvis actually recorded “White Christmas,” Irving Berlin was furious and attempted to persuade radio stations not to play the record.
…
This is Jack’s Christmas song:
WHAT ONCE WAS MAGIC: ANOTHER CHRISTMAS SONG
How can we write
Another Christmas song
When we know
That “giving” means “buying”
And “brotherhood” means “buying”
The green not of holly but of our cash flow
“Commercial” they say
When the season comes along
And we go
Into the stores in masses–
All, lower to upper classes–
With the green not of holly but of our cash flow
And yet you remember
25th of December
A time you were told
That magic happened
In days of old
A child’s sense fills you
As you buy more and more
And fall to the folly
The deep, deep folly
Of the frantic, fantastic, fabulous department store…
And you sing
That giving means giving
And brotherhood means brotherhood
And you sigh
Remembering
What once was magic
And is magic still
Became a lie
(softly) Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas
To all!
*
JACK’S DRAWING OF IRVING BERLIN:
somewhere inside him
still
was the little jewish boy
who had to sing in the streets
because his people were so poor