Many people have been “dreaming” of a White Christmas ever since they heard the song for the first time. Composed by Irving Berlin for the film HOLIDAY INN (1940), the lyrics (via the dulcet crooning of Bing Crosby) convey a snowbound, will-o’-the-wisp setting Where the treetops glisten/ and children listen/ To hear sleigh bells in the snow that is romanticized dreaming at its best. Nevertheless, it appears to be a very real place, if only in one’s imagination or, of course, in one’s dreams; a place most of us had somehow experienced in the distant past (even if we had grown up in the tropics) and will experience again sometime in the future.
The song forever associated elements such as the white of snow and the sound of sleigh bells with the ostensible joy and love of the Christmas season. But what does the like of snow and sleigh bells have to do with the birth of a man born in Judea over 2000 years ago? Obviously, it has nothing to with either the demiurgic, the historic, or apocryphal Jesus and everything to do with Christmas’ preponderant secular aspects; just one example from a clever blend of literature, song and unabashed commercialism giving Christmas its all-encompassing charm for the past 100 to 150 years.
One credits Charles Dickens, author of “A Christmas Carol,” which was hugely influential in establishing various Christmas rituals. Dickens was born in 1812, and as a child experienced a run of very cold, snowy winters during Europe’s “Little Ice Age.” His romanticized memory of those winters went into the book
In the past, snow meant horse-pulled sleighs, which made it easier for people to get together for the holiday. And nostalgic illustrations, like Norman Rockwell’s snowy Christmas scenes, also played a role. The Seattle Times
Indeed, Christmas has gone through so many configurations and transfiguration in its two millennia lifetime–from a pagan-influenced to a Gnostic-revised to a Catholic Church-decreed to a Reformist-modified form of ritual—that it boggles the mind of anyone who endeavors to make sense of it. Such romanticisms as Berlin’s winter fairyland were more popular because easier to comprehend and, ultimately, easier to arrive at and to love…like the Magi following a mysterious star, modern man tends to follow an equally mysterious body in the that of the human heart. We’re constantly in search of that special place: be it one of glistening treetops and sleigh bells or a lowly manger sheltering a heavenly infant; in any event, they both offer an entrancing promise of love.
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