OPEN THREAD: Hope you had a fine day.

WATCHING THE RAVENS BLOWING OUT THE TEXANS IN A SNOOZE FEST ON NETFLIX, MISTER WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE JOHN MADDEN AGAIN:

Or to put it another way:

Beyoncé’s Weimar Christmas halftime show was something to behold: Beyoncé brings out Blue Ivy at halftime performance at the Houston Texans-Baltimore Ravens game amid Jay-Z’s rape lawsuit.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs.

Much of the Jewish migration to the U.S. at the start of the 20th century came from the Pale of Settlement, the area ruled until the Russian Revolution by the Romanov dynasty. Jews were segregated into isolated towns known as shtetls where they were marginalized and often subjected to pogroms. Imagine, then, these people arriving at Ellis Island, where they were greeted by opportunity, diversity, and technology, finally free to express themselves in a new land.

They brought with them the Jewish musical tradition: the cantorial minor keys found in Jewish prayer. It’s no accident that Harold Arlen (born Chaim Arluck), the composer of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Stormy Weather,” was the son of a cantor.

Then, there was the Yiddish language, a hybrid tongue with words plucked from German, Hebrew, and other languages. Yiddish lends itself to surprising rhymes and pleasant meter. In this respect Yiddish is a lot like American music itself—an alchemy of cultures that create a delightful and unexpected new combination.

So it’s this combination of factorsthe Yiddish language, the freedom America afforded Jewish immigrants, and the haunting minor key found in Jewish prayerthat help explain why Jews wrote so many of the great American songs.

They gave us the American songbook. George and Ira Gershwin, the brothers who wrote “I Got Rhythm.” Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who together wrote “The Sound of Music” and many other unforgettable Broadway shows. The great Jerome Kern, one of the first breakout stars of New York’s Tin Pan Alley, who composed the scores for “Show Boat” and “Swing Time,” two of the first major modern musicals.

But if there was one man who embodied the alchemy of the Jewish American experience in a single life, it was Irving Berlin, the greatest American composer of them all.

A decade ago, Mark Steyn described the horrible turn that Berlin’s life would take on the way to writing “White Christmas:”

Christmas was not kind to Irving Berlin. At 5 o’clock on the morning of Christmas Day 1928, his 31/2-week-old son, Irving Junior, was found dead in his bassinet. ‘I’m sure,’ his daughter Mary Ellin told me a few years back, ‘it was what we would now call “crib death”.’

Does that cast ‘White Christmas’ in a different light? The plangent melancholy the GIs heard in the tune, the unsettling chromatic phrase, the eerie harmonic darkening under the words ‘where children listen’; it’s not too fanciful to suggest the singer’s dreaming of children no longer around to listen. When the girls grew up and left home, Irving Berlin, symbol of the American Christmas, gave up celebrating it. ‘We both hated Christmas,’ Mrs Berlin said later. ‘We only did it for you children.’

To take a baby on Christmas morning mocks the very meaning of the day. And to take Irving Berlin’s seems an even crueller jest — to reward his uncanny ability to articulate the sentiments of his countrymen by depriving him of the possibility of sharing them.

Berlin was a professional Tin Pan Alleyman, but his story, his Christmas is there in the music. 23 years after his death, he embodies all the possibilities of America: his family arrived at Ellis Island as poor and foreign and disadvantaged as you can be, and yet he wove himself into the very fabric of the nation. His life and his art are part of the definition of America. Whatever his doubts about God, Berlin kept faith with his adopted land — and that faith is what millions heard 70 years ago in ‘White Christmas’.

But then, as Mark Judge wrote on Monday: From Superman to Bob Dylan: How Jews enriched our culture.

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Christmas really a pagan festival?

The celebration of Christmas is suffused with probable pre-Christian elements, from the Yule Log to the Lord of Misrule (an official appointed to oversee the festivities) but this should hardly surprise us. After all, the priority of early missionaries was to ensure that people came to believe in the Christian God. Customs with no direct bearing on the basics of belief were often left alone; for example, it was several centuries before Anglo-Saxon missionaries to Germany began to interfere in pre-Christian funeral rites or betrothal customs. The medieval church did not, as some think, demand control of every aspect of people’s lives. However, whether surviving pre-Christian customs should be called pagan is debateable, since ‘paganism’ seems to imply something to do with the cult of pagan deities. It is pretty clear that such cults disappeared fairly quickly, within a few decades of the Christianisation of most European nations, even if many other traces of pre-Christian culture remained.

So, is Christmas pagan? In the sense that Christmas is a festival that retains, in most cultures, elements of pre-Christian midwinter festivities, the answer can be yes – provided we’re prepared to use the word ‘pagan’ in quite a loose way.

I blame Saturnalia:

 

HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

MERRY CHRISTMAS:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!