{"id":2193,"date":"2022-12-06T09:00:01","date_gmt":"2022-12-06T14:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=2193"},"modified":"2022-12-06T09:00:40","modified_gmt":"2022-12-06T14:00:40","slug":"white-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/12\/06\/white-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"White Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, <\/em>click here<\/a>.
 
Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being.<\/em>
 
Four centuries ago, a Swiss medical student noticed that soldiers fighting far away from home often experienced deep feelings of melancholy.
 
Since he couldn\u2019t find a word that appropriately described their experience, he coined one of his own: nostalgia<\/em>. 
 
It was a combination of two Greek words: nostos <\/em>(\u201chomecoming\u201d) and algos <\/em>(\u201cpain\u201d or \u201cache\u201d).  Nostalgia is an almost physical ache to go home, or to go back to a happier past, or perhaps to go forward to reclaim something priceless that has somehow been lost.
 
White Christmas<\/em>, hands down, is the most nostalgic movie on our list this month.  The audience feels deep nostalgia just by watching a story about characters who are themselves feeling deep nostalgia.
 
The plot plays second fiddle to the musical score \u2013 one Irving Berlin hit after another.  It\u2019s 1954, and Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye are old World War II Army buddies making a living as a song-and-dance team.  Crosby does most of the singing and Kaye does most of the dancing.  They fall in love with the Haynes Sisters \u2013 Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen \u2013 the former who does most of the singing and the latter who does most of the dancing.  In fact, when the girls sing their famous duet \u201cSisters,\u201d you\u2019re hearing Clooney\u2019s rich voice carrying both parts.   
 
The four eventually find themselves in a snow-less Vermont, trying to attract customers to an inn that is owned by their beloved retired commanding general.  Crosby and Kaye secretly invite the members of their old unit, now scattered around the country, to travel to New England on Christmas Eve to pack the house.
 
What binds the movie together is Berlin\u2019s most famous song.  \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d originally appeared in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn<\/em> and was reprised in 1946\u2019s Blue Skies<\/em>.  It is almost certainly the bestselling song of all time \u2013 a mark it holds only unofficially, since musical \u201ccharts\u201d didn\u2019t begin documenting the sales of top singles until the 1950s.
 
Crosby sang the song in public for the first time shortly before Christmas 1941, only weeks after Pearl Harbor.  Throughout the war, wherever he traveled to entertain American troops, \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d was the soldiers\u2019 number one request.
 
They were stabbed by nostalgia \u2013 a deep longing to return, safe and alive, to homes that would be more secure because of their sacrifices on the front lines. 
 
In the opening scenes of the movie, Crosby sings \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d amidst falling shells in a war-shattered landscape.  As the movie closes, with snow at last whitening the Vermont landscape, the general, the troops who love him, and the two romantic song-and-dance couples join to sing it again.  It doesn\u2019t get much more nostalgic than that.
 
Here\u2019s a collection of favorite scenes.  Jump to the end to enjoy the big finale: “White Christmas” – Top 5 Scenes of White Christmas – General – Snow – The Ending – Bing Crosby – YouTube<\/a>
 
Christmas was a complicated day for Irving Berlin.
 
He, a Russian-born Jew, had married Ellin Mackay, the daughter of a wealthy Catholic businessman.  Clarence Mackay did not approve.  He withheld his blessing and refused to speak to them for three years.  That all changed when the Berlins\u2019 infant son Irving Berlin Jr. \u2013 not even a month old, and the only son they would ever have during their 62 years of marriage \u2013 died on December 25, 1928.  Awash with shared grief, Mackay re-entered their lives. 
 
For Berlin, \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d evoked a yearning to somehow redeem and reclaim what was for him the most painful day of the year. 
 
We yearn for a world in which everything broken can finally be healed or repaired.  Does that mean we should be praying, \u201cBeam me up, Jesus\u201d?  Is the hope of heaven just a means of escape from the disappointment of the present world?
 
The apostle Paul has a different take: 
 
\u201cAll around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it\u2019s not only around us; it\u2019s within<\/em> us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We\u2019re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance\u201d (Romans 8:22-23, The Message<\/em>).
 
Our nostalgia for childhood, for the joys of past Christmases, for former days of health and hope, is, at root, a nostalgia for our true spiritual home \u2013 the new creation that God is even now preparing.
 
It\u2019s a new world that, by God\u2019s grace, we ourselves can help bring about.
 
And tomorrow will bring us one day closer to its reality.

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To listen to this reflection as a podcast, click here. Throughout the season of Advent \u2013 which this year encompasses the four weeks leading up to December 25 \u2013 we\u2019re looking at classic Christmas movies and how they might connect us to the miracle of God choosing to become a human being. Four centuries ago, a Swiss medical student noticed that soldiers fighting… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2194,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[539,540],"class_list":["post-2193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christmas-movies","tag-nostalgia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2196,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions\/2196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}