“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,

Jack Frost nipping at your nose,

Yuletide carols being sung by a choir,

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And folks dressed up like Eskimos”

It’s hard to think of words or music that conjure up the Christmas season more quickly than the opening of “The Christmas Song.”

The images evoke a classic, timeless Christmas — chestnuts roasting, carols, people bundled up against the cold. Yet the song was actually written on a sweltering day in the summer of 1945 in Hollywood, Calif., by Bob Wells and Mel Tormé, who were simply trying to imaginatively cool themselves off.

Bing Crosby, with Marjorie Reynolds, sings "White Christmas" in the 1942 movie Holiday Inn. The song, which became a huge hit, especially after appearing in another Crosby vehicle, White Christmas in 1954, was penned by Jewish composer Irving Berlin.

And though the song has become a worldwide symbol of Christmas, like nearly all the modern songs that now define this fundamentally Christian holiday it was written by Jews.

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Names like George Wyle (born Bernard Weissman), Eddie Pola (Sidney Pollacsek), Felix Bernard, Jay Livingston (Jacob Levison), Ray Evans, Gloria Shayne Baker (Gloria Shain), Robert Wells (Robert Levison), Robert May and Johnny Marks might be unfamiliar today, but along with better-known songwriters like Mel Tormé, Jule Styne, Sammy Cahn and Irving Berlin, they wrote the core of the secular Christmas-song repertoire.

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Those songs include: “Do You Hear What I Hear,” “Silver Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Winter Wonderland,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “White Christmas” and “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” also written during the same blistering California summer as “The Christmas Song.”

The story of how this came to be is a remarkable tale of immigrant outsiders who rejected their parents’ European pasts, embraced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway and Hollywood, and began to write the soundtrack to America’s dreams. It’s a rich story involving pogroms, prejudice, poverty, empathy, assimilation and the powerful creative imaginations of an extraordinary group of songwriters.

Russian-born Israel Isidore Beilin not only took on a new name in New York - Irving Berlin - but he also tapped into the Christmas traditions of his new home for melodic and lyrical images that would help to make his song "White Christmas" a beloved holiday classic. (AP file photo )

The Russian pogrom

The story begins in Russia at the end of the 19th century. When Alexander II, the great Russian reformer who freed the serfs, was assassinated in 1881, his son Alexander III ascended to the throne. It quickly became clear that his repressive regime would do everything it could to undo his father’s liberal reforms and stigmatize the Jews. According to one of Alexander’s closest advisers, the hope was that “one-third of the Jews will convert, one third will die, and one-third will flee the country.”

The plan worked. Between 1881 and 1914 more than two million Jews left Russia, with America the prime destination. No single city was affected more by the influx of Jews than New York, where the Jewish population grew from approximately 80,000 in 1870 to 1.4 million in 1915, or almost 28 per cent of the city’s population.

Many of these poor immigrants congregated in the filthy tenements of the Lower East Side, where they desperately tried to eke out a living in whatever menial jobs they could find. Forbidden from nearly all professions and restricted from pursuing higher education, a surprisingly large number found their way into the world of popular music. When asked why there were so many Jews in show business, Minnie Marx, the mother of the Marx Brothers said, “Where else can people who don’t know anything make so much money?”

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The overwhelming impulse among the children of Jewish immigrants was to assimilate, and the first step in becoming “American” nearly always involved changing their names. Israel Baline became Irving Berlin, Jacob and Israel Gershowitz became George and Ira Gershwin, Hyman Arluck became Harold Arlen, Asa Yoelson became Al Jolson and Isidore Hochberg became “Yip” Harburg. Most not only left their names behind, but all traces of their Jewishness as well.

As outsiders they were extraordinarily sensitive to the hopes and dreams of the American middle class they so desperately wanted to enter. As a deeply troubled America witnessed the horror of the Second World War, Jewish songwriters provided comfort by creating a songbook for a secular Christmas they invented themselves.

Before Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” — sung by Bing Crosby — broke sales records in 1942, composers had spent little time on Christmas songs because it seemed their appeal could only be seasonal. But 1942 was the first Christmas that millions of American soldiers would spend away from home, and “White Christmas” struck a deep chord.

Though the song contains only two images of Christmas — treetops glistening, and children listening to sleigh bells — that was enough to allow Americans to imagine a reassuring, Norman Rockwell, Currier-and-Ives, small-town, New England past with sleigh rides and falling snow. A mythic, secular American Christmas on which the country could project its dreams. A Christmas in which even Jews could participate.

Rudolph the outsider

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," written by Robert May, was turned into a hit song in 1949. The lyrics reflect May's difficult childhood as a Jewish outsider. (Classic Media)

The phenomenal success of “White Christmas” led other Jewish songwriters to follow Berlin’s path.

Though on the surface their songs contain no trace of the authors’ Jewish identities, Robert May’s poem “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which was turned into a song by Johnny Marks in 1949, is actually a parable of May’s painful childhood as a Jewish outsider.

Rudolph with his shiny nose is called names and laughed at by the other reindeer. Yet unlike May, who assimilated so completely that his second wife and children never even knew he was Jewish, Rudolph subversively refuses to assimilate. His “Jewishness” — his red nose — saves Santa on a foggy Christmas Eve.

Rudolph (if not May) is ultimately accepted precisely for who he is — for what makes him different. May’s wish-fulfilment fantasy is made even more poignant by the fact that his words were written in December 1939, at the height of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews.

Context also changes the way we hear Gloria Shayne Baker’s “Do You Hear What I Hear?”

Shayne Baker grew up in Brookline, Mass., next to door to Joseph and Rose Kennedy as well as their son John F. Kennedy and knew the family well. In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it seemed Russia and the United States might go to war, Shayne Baker and her husband Noël Regney wrote “Do You Hear What I Hear?” as a plea for peace.

As is so often the case, the song seeks to escape the anxiety of the present back to an imagined past. It bridges the secular and sacred worlds of Christmas by retelling the nativity story — “A child, a child, shivers in the cold; Let us bring Him silver and gold” — in a modern musical language tinged with ancient-sounding modal harmonies. Yet the climax of the song speaks directly and fervently to the contemporary crisis faced by her childhood neighbour, President Kennedy: “Said the king to the people ev’rywhere, ‘Listen to what I say: Pray for peace, people ev’rywhere!’”

The great unifiers

Jazz singer and composer Mel Torme in 1946, a year after he co-wrote "The Christmas Song." (Gene Lester)

Each of these Jewish songwriters took their own individual path toward assimilation, but together they created the soundtrack for a truly melting-pot Christmas in which people of all faiths could participate. Everyone was invited to this new, democratic Christmas party and that inclusive, joyful, welcoming spirit is part of what makes these songs so appealing.

The new secular Christmas they helped invent reflected the country’s deepest hopes and dreams of connection, and it brought people together in a profoundly divided world.

Russian composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, “Tradition is a living force that animates and informs the present. Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition ... appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one’s descendants.” This idea of tradition as a living force that is constantly being reinvented — made to bear fruit — before being passed on is at the heart of the story of these Jewish songwriters.

They took elements of the dominant culture around them — the New England winters, Christmas trees, roasting chestnuts, sleigh bells — closed their eyes and invented a great, golden past that never was: A simpler, more innocent past that a troubled country could look back to for comfort, even if it only existed in the imaginations of its creators. Their songs continue to bring this idyllic, mythic past to life and allow us, for at least one day a year, to believe in it.

The tradition of Christmas songs continues to evolve. In 1957, Irving Berlin, who despised rock ’n’ roll, tried to ban Elvis Presley’s recording of “White Christmas,” but it quickly reached No. 1 on Billboard’s chart. Its success opened the floodgates for rock versions of these Christmas songs, which continue to inundate the market every year as new generations of performers reinterpret these classic songs.

However, as the holiday season approaches, it is important to remember that they came from the children of Jewish immigrants, desperate to leave their pasts behind and join mainstream America. And today, at this polarizing moment in our history, when the place of immigrants in our society is under intense scrutiny, it might be valuable to remember that these songs of immigrants, songs that came out of America’s melting pot, have become the voice of the world’s Christmas.

They have become the soundtrack of our holiday dreams.

Rob Kapilow is an American composer, conductor, author and commentator. He is also the conductor and host of the “What Makes it Great?” series with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Kapilow is featured in Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, airing Sunday at 8 p.m. on documentary Channel and Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Xmas songs, Jewish writers

“Do You Hear What I Hear”

“Silver Bells”

“The Christmas Song”

“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”

“Holly Jolly Christmas”

“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”

“Winter Wonderland”

“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”

“Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!”

“White Christmas”