Over the weekend, we we finally got our Christmas decorating done. Which is to say, I hauled the various boxes out of their storage spots in the garage, the boys moved said boxes to locations specified by the operational director (MLGB), I set up the tree, troubleshot the lights with the help of Adventure Girl, then settled downstairs with several fingers of Dr. Crow’s finest to move my baseball card collection into a different room while the Terror Team collectively decorated the tree upstairs.
Then, after supper, showers, and all the other necessary preparations, everyone settled into their sleeping bags under the light of the Christmas Tree to watch White Christmas. Just like we do every year. But for me, that movie hit a little differently this year.
Some of that is probably thanks to the movie’s opening, combined with Sarge’s excellent fictional series over at The Chant. His historical fiction series has been following several units on both sides of the European front ever since D-Day, and they’re shortly about to enter into what history now recalls as The Battle of the Bulge. Knowing that, and watching the opening scene of White Christmas where the troops are huddled among some bombed out buildings near the front lines on Christmas Eve 1944, it’s tough not to imagine some of Sarge’s characters in that audience.
I wish I could recall the blog I read a year or two ago which made the argument that White Christmas, while not a war movie, per se, is really the happy ending to most war movies of the time. The guys and gals come home. Wallace and Davis are hugely successful. The Hanes Sisters, who might have been factory workers during the war, become an act and eventually get their guys. Even the implied tragedy seems to have worked out okay.
Said tragedy being that for General Waverly to be taking care of his teenage granddaughter pretty implicitly implies that he’s a widower, and that both her parents are dead. Most likely her father was killed in action during the war, and however her mother passed, it falls to the old general whose led hundreds of men into battle to see to the upbringing of most likely his sole surviving family.
It all ends in a slam-bang musical finish, with the men of the 151st gathering for both a reunion, and a recognition of their beloved general.
For me, there’s four shows that I need to watch every Christmas time – White Christmas is always the first one too. It doesn’t feel like Christmas in the house until the tree is up, and we’ve watched this movie. Soon we’ll gather around and watch Home Alone. I’ll watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation while wrapping presents (and feeling more like Clark Griswald with every passing year), and we’ll gather around some kind of device to watch A Wish for Wings That Work on Christmas Eve. But it all starts with White Christmas. And living in South Dakota as I do now, we get those a lot.
I don’t begrudge snow in December. It looks pretty, and it sets the mood perfectly. I might grip about the snow and the cold for the rest of winter (and especially when Lady Winter overstays her welcome and dumps snow on us in April and May) but in December, sign me up for a white Christmas every year.