“White Christmas” is an Irving Berlin song whose lyrics reminisce about White Christmases. The morning after he wrote the song — Berlin usually stayed up all night writing — the songwriter went to his office and told his musical secretary, “Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written — hell, I just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written!”
“White Christmas” was introduced by Bing Crosby in the 1942 musical Holiday Inn. In the film, he actually sings it in a duet with Marjorie Reynolds. The song went on to receive the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Though while Marjorie Reynolds was the actress playing Linda Mason, her voice was dubbed by Martha Mears for the movie, and in the script as originally conceived, Reynolds, not Crosby, was to sing the song.
The Crosby recording is the biggest selling single of all time, as confirmed by the 2008 Guinness Book of Records. Crosby himself was dismissive of the achievement, saying that “a jackdaw with a cleft palate could have sung it successfully.”
