Song Lyric of the Day (Irving Berlin and the Melancholy of “White Christmas”)

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know…”—Irving Berlin, “White Christmas,” originally composed for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, later the centerpiece for White Christmas (1954)

(Yesterday, “The Leonard Lopate Show” on the local public radio station, WNYC-FM, featured Kerry O’Malley and Stephen Bogardus, co-stars of the musical adaptation of the Berlin film that’s now playing on Broadway. What made Berlin’s songs so special? Lopate asked.

Ms. O’Malley answered that they were so “emotional,” pointing to the vein of melancholy that ran through his songs as well as his life.

Melancholy? Berlin, the composer of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Doing What Comes Nat’rally,” “God Bless America,” and other uptempo tunes too numerous to mention? I wouldn’t have believed it about his most famous song, “White Christmas,” especially if I’d been listening to the version I heard while passing through the Port Authority Bus Station this morning—Darlene Love’s rendition, from A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector --which had its 45th anniversary this year, incidentally.

But then I looked at the lyrics to “White Christmas.” And you know what? Ms. O’Malley is right.

To start with, “White Christmas” is not about present reality. It evokes “the ones I used to know.” It’s an exercise in nostalgia by an adult remembering a world of innocence he or she can never recapture. The speaker may wish for that childlike innocence, that whiteness, but such a vision is, at best, achieved through the eyes of the young.

Even the first line of the song is indicative. The speaker is “dreaming” of a white Christmas—it is not reality. The song had its premiere in WWII, as did “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” the Buck Ram-Kim Gannon-Walter Kent song which, you might remember, saved its best line for last: “if only in my dreams.”

For American service personnel in a titanic conflict, the Currier & Ives scenes brought to mind by both these songs held a simple but powerful resonance, even if it was far removed from the bloody scenes they were witnessing day by day.)