Home is where the snow is

Some songs are hits – Number One for a couple of weeks. Some songs are standards – they endure decade after decade. And a few very rare songs reach way beyond either category, to embed themselves so deeply in the collective consciousness they become part of the soundtrack of society. They start off the same as all the other numbers, written for a show or a movie, a singer or an event, but they float free of the writer, they outlast the singer, transcend the movie, change the event. In White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, Jody Rosen makes the case that the subject of his book transformed the American Christmas. There are a couple of what we now think of as seasonal standards that predate Irving Berlin’s entry into the field, but neither became a pillar of the Xmas repertoire, because until ‘White Christmas’ came along there was no such thing.