Irving Berlin, Bing Crosby: Sadness with “White Chrismas”

December 24, 2025

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ajtonyperkins

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Both men found sadness in this wildly popular song.

This post is a follow-up to the previous post about the song “White Christmas.” In that piece, I focused on the effect that the song placed on my father and his brother.

In this essay, I will focus on the composer Irving Berlin and the performer Bing Crosby.

Irving Berlin found sadness in Christmas. As a Jew, he didn’t celebrate the holiday. His sadness was the result of his baby son, Irving Jr., dying on Christmas Day in 1928. He would visit his son’s grave every Christmas following his death.

Berlin wrote “White Christmas” for the movie Holiday Inn, released in 1942. The world first heard the song, sung by Bing Crosby, on Christmas 1941, 18 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The song became an instant hit for Americans at home and overseas.

Crosby’s nephew, Howard Crosby, told the Spokesman-Review in 2016: “I once asked Uncle Bing about the most difficult thing he ever had to do during his entertainment career. He didn’t have to think about it. He said in December, 1944, he was in a USO show with Bob Hope and the Andrews Sisters. They did an outdoor show in northern France.”

He continued, “At the end of the show, he had to stand there and sing ‘White Christmas’ with 100,000 G.I.’s in tears without breaking down himself. Of course, a lot of those boys were killed in the Battle of the Bulge a few days later.” ‘White Christmas’ isn’t really about Christmas at all — the sad story behind America’s favorite song | The Independent