Song of the Week: “White Christmas” by The Drifters

It’s Christmas…or it’s almost Christmas!

Anyway, the Drifters performed a great version of a classic Christmas song and in the video it’s set to a pretty decent holiday themed cartoon. I think every holiday song should have a poppier, swing-infused counterpart. Christmas songs are great, but most of them can be quite slow and boring, despite all the hard work of the Beach Boys. I guess every song has to somehow fit the saccharine, stuffy, atmosphere (smelling distinctly of clove and allspice) that comes to define late-December, but songs like this one can serve to clean the palate of both the caroler and the carolee. Who doesn’t love dancing while decorating the tree?

The popularity of this song, however, is a bit confusing to me. How much of the world actually experiences a true white Christmas every year? In the case of the United States, less than half of it can expect to have a better than fifty percent chance of seeing snow on the ground Christmas morning. Can anyone in Texas or Arizona or Los Angeles truly enjoy singing along to this song knowing very well that, in the best case scenario, they can only wake up to a beautifully cloudless sunny and bright sky before opening their presents (which – by the way – must be an absolutely horrible sight)?

My grandmother has maybe twenty or thirty conversation starters that she cycles through during the year, categorized by seasonal appropriateness. Every single winter, one of her major talking points is to complain that, back when she was a kid, there was a foot of snow on the ground by Thanksgiving and now you can’t expect a regular snowfall until January.

My question is what happens to songs like these in the future. For whatever reason, the earth’s weather is becoming different. Maybe the globe is getting warmer. Regardless, the climate is definitely changing. And it seems that pretty soon, snow may or may not stop falling from the sky.

What will happen to our collective dream of enjoying a White Christmas if we know that snow is an environmental impossibility? Onto what anthropomorphic creations will children project the personality of Parson Brown? How will Dean Martin pressure a woman into having sex if, baby, it’s never cold outside?

Forget about the fiscal cliff or the civil war in Syria. These are the questions people! Wake up!