What’s the one Christmas muzak standard you always hear playing on loop inside retail stores coast to coast, starting around Thanksgiving and never ceasing until New Years’ Day? Editor’s note: My posting this video doesn’t suggest that I’ve backed off on my belief that Jimmy Fallon played a small but significant role in helping Donald Trump get elected. He did, and as far as I’m concerned he’ll never live it down.
“White Christmas,” the Bing Crosby/Irving Berlin standard, popped on a Kraft Music Hall broadcast 75 years ago today. A History.com piece observes that the song “strikes a mood that isn’t necessarily jolly. As Jody Rosen, author of the 2002 book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, told National Public Radio, ‘It’s very melancholy…and I think this really makes it stand out amongst kind of chirpy seasonal standards…I think that’s one of the reasons why people keep responding to it, because our feelings over the holiday season are ambivalent.” Do GenX and Millenial types even know about this song? They probably regard it as too schmaltzy.