His research indicates that Irving Berlin may have been working on the song as early as 1938, and with a very different concept in mind. Slate music critic Jody Rosen wrote a book about White Christmas in 2002. This is Christmastime, why is he singing about these palm trees? Then he suddenly goes into White Christmas, and I thought, that's interesting, I never heard that before.” 'And he starts singing, 'The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway.', and I didn't know what the heck he was singing about.

“Crosby didn't sing the verse until a TV show in the late 1960s, which I remember watching,' Fogel says.

Fogel’s a singer and broadcaster he's also something of an expert on Bing Crosby, and he’s hosting a special about the crooner's Christmas recordings for Sirius XM.įogel says Crosby didn’t sing the verse when he debuted “White Christmas” in the movie Holiday Inn in 1942, and he also didn’t sing it in the 1954 film named after the song. Someone like Arne Fogel, whom I interviewed recently for a story I did about “White Christmas” for The California Report. For a child like me growing up in the upper Midwest, singing “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” was much like saying “I’m dreaming of a peanut butter sandwich in my lunchbox.” You might welcome it, but whether you did or not you were pretty certain that nine times out of ten that's what you were going to get.īut the verse isn’t heard very often, and when it is it’s frequently performed by someone steeped in twentieth-century popular song.

White Christmas by Jody Rosen