Christmas Week: White Christmas (1954)

1 year ago

Christmas Week: White Christmas (1954)

WHAT A FINE OUTFIT

by Anaïs Escobar

“I liked White Christmas a lot more before I found out that Bing Crosby beat his kids.”

This is the only line of this essay I’ve had sitting in drafts for days. It sums up how I feel about the movie, yet it’s a bit too pithy to convey the ache. I saw a lot of movies early in life but White Christmas had a strong hold on me. In my family, we watched it every year right after Thanksgiving and again a month later, the night of Christmas Day. It book-ended an entire month of preparation, of good feeling, of anticipation. Even though the men in my family are not prone to watching musicals, we all gathered around at my grandmother’s house, and even my dad couldn’t help but hum certain songs. He harrumphed once when I caught him with a tear in his eye at the end of the film. White Christmas is without a doubt my family’s Christmas movie.

My grandmother told me she first saw the film in one of the oldest moviehouses in Havana. She was eighteen when it came out and she went with her girlfriends around Christmastime. She loved it, especially the music as a musician herself, wondering what Christmas could be like outside of a tropical climate; she had never seen snow. A few years later, she did, but by no choice of her own. Communism came to Cuba and she and my grandfather, newly married with a baby girl, gathered what they could and got on a plane to the United States. I type this while wearing a ring that has been in my family for over 100 years, smuggled out of Cuba in the heel of my grandmother’s shoe.

In those days, the US government placed new Cuban exiles with relatives if possible and, for them, this meant cousins of theirs living in Indiana (we are nothing if not mutts of heritage). They took a flight from Miami and ended up in a tiny town in Indiana on St. Patrick’s Day. It was still the middle of winter and my grandparents had never seen snow. College-educated people, they nonetheless had to work any kind of jobs they could get while they went through the process of assimilating, getting back into their chosen fields. My grandfather’s first job was chopping down trees, a literal lumberjack; he borrowed a coat from a neighbor and learned what winter was. Their little girl, later to become my mother, went to preschool and then kindergarten, becoming thoroughly American in the process. She was the only girl in her kindergarten class with pierced ears.

That first Christmas, they had a real tree that they decorated together on
Christmas Eve. It snowed Christmas day and my grandmother’s heart swelled, full of the possibilities their new home allowed for her family and aching with the realization that she would never have a Christmas at home again. She could never go back, everything she grew up with and knew gutted and so she built a new home, knowing that in life you ultimately have to make the family and life you want. My grandparents built a beautiful home in Indiana and then in Florida, had another baby, and watched their children grow up. Twenty-five or so years after they came to this country, I was born, coming into years of tradition rebuilt from scratch against a very different landscape than they were used to. The White Christmas VHS tape was just one of many pieces of a world that seemed to be created just for me.

It was a beautiful thing, too, watching bright, shining people put on a show. White Christmas is your typical skeleton of a musical in this aspect, as Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye - with the help of Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen - put on shows over and over again. First, to send off their departing army general with the thanks he deserves, then professionally many times over, and finally coming full circle by helping their former general whose Vermont inn is facing hard times. It’s a loose plot but it’s enough to string together some truly lovely numbers, most of which thankfully feature all of these players at their very best. From the surface, it is any 1950’s musical you could pick off the shelf. This is what I saw as a kid and why it spoke to me: songs, joy, problems that seemed terrible but were resolved with a dance number. It is the epitome of Christmas in that no matter how screwed up something gets, for one day it is forgotten and everyone puts aside their issues.

I didn’t begin to see the cracks in this movie, Christmas, and in fact, life until I was older. My parents got divorced, my mom became a terrifying new person, and we fell apart. I felt bad for my grandparents who tried to keep everyone together, to hold together the pieces of the life they had built and rebuilt for generations of their family. Once again, things fell apart. We were all scattered for a while and Christmas wasn’t the same. I noticed it when I realized that not only were members of my family not at Christmas festivities but that we hadn’t watched White Christmas in two years. It’s not that things were perfect before but everybody was trying to be together, trying to be happy. Saying that life is hard is an understatement but sometimes it just is and you can’t cope;
Christmas can become a casualty.

There is a sort of dark center to White Christmas that I didn’t notice when I was a kid. When the cracks in life started to show, I realized that this was a movie about people like me, lonely people who just wanted to make things okay, even if only for a day. I spent years so unhappy about the things that didn’t work out and I missed out on a lot of good things. When things don’t work out in life, that’s out of your control but you have a choice, a moment, where you decide to build your own life. It’s putting aside your hurt, your pride, your anger and making things happen. It’s Rosemary Clooney going back to Vermont to see if she can make things work with Bing Crosby. It’s Bing himself not running away and making sure that he can do something for a good man he respects. It’s never easy but it’s usually worth it at some point.

It’s two weeks from Christmas and my family has already watched White Christmas once this year. It could be for a number of reasons: my aunt passing away two months ago, reconciliations between different members, the realization that time goes really fast. It’s good to watch this movie with my family again and sitting next to my grandmother with my head on her shoulder, I feel a lot like she must have felt her first Christmas in this country. My past and the things I knew are moving further away from me, still aching, and my present and future are uncertain but wonderful. I am building a life for myself, finding people who are a part of my chosen family, and allowing myself to let go of the pain that life causes for, I don’t know, a chance at something really good. This is what Christmas is.

It may be naive as an adult to think that life could be like a musical and that everyone could set aside their differences for one day, putting on a good face, but it’s worth a try. There isn’t a song and choreography to cap everything off but there is a glimmer of hope in the attempt. No Christmas is perfect and as soon as I saw that even about a movie like White Christmas, it was simultaneously crushing and a relief. So I don’t know if I liked White Christmas
more before I found out about Bing and his kids or about the fact that everything can fall apart. Now I like it because I’ve found that better things fall together and some good things can last a long time. I, like my grandmother, will always yearn for all the things I’ve lost but I’m making and living something much better.

I am still hoping for snow though.

Anaïs Escobar is a writer who loves Christmas very much despite having a
birthday in such close proximity to baby Jesus (December 28th). She is
releasing her first collection of short stories, The Last Good Birthday, in 2011 and blogs at You’ve Escaped.