“City sidewalks; busy sidewalks/Dressed in holiday style/In the air, there’s a feeling of Christmas/Children laughing, people passing/Meeting smile after smile/And on every street corner you’ll hear/Silver bells, silver bells/It’s Christmas time in the city. . . .”
Evans and Livingston,
In Canada’s multicultural society, why do pollsters run annual surveys to ask us whether we think it is OK to wish someone Merry Christmas?
But run them they do. Can you imagine the uproar if polls asked whether it was still kosher for our Jewish friends to celebrate Hanukkah, or for Muslims to respect the prayers and charity of Ramadan? Does anyone question the relevance of Chinese New Year or the Sikhs’ Vaisakhi Khalsa Day?
Bah! Humbug! to you, Angus, Ekos and Ipsos. Be off! Leave us in peace to cuddle down next to our Yule logs to create new family traditions and rekindle memories of childhood Nativity scenes and of movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street and Damon Runyon’s riotous story, The Lemon Drop Kid.
There’s a reason why sentimental black and white films still appeal to young and almost old alike. It’s because they remind each successive generation of all that is good in people’s hearts in our crazy world.
Religion-based or not, if Christmas does the same just once every year, what can be wrong with that?
None of that explains, though, why comedic gangsters, silver bells and miracles on the streets of New York City are so firmly entrenched in the heart of a London-born Canadian as a part of her Christmases past.
Could it be because all three films were released in the heady five years following the end of the Second World War?
Despite all the blackened, bombed-out buildings, Londoners had taken a huge, cleansing breath and burst into freedom. For a girl barely into her teenage years, the simplest new experience became an adventure.
Gone was the sense of danger and doom. Food-rationing was coming to an end. Imported bananas were an exciting new taste, and movies, made in faraway America no less, became the stuff of girlhood magic.
Judging from recordings being replayed today and from the performances of school choirs in our malls, millions of others have been similarly captivated over the ensuing six decades.
Ray Evans and Jay Livingston composed Silver Bells for the Bob Hope-Marilyn Maxwell comedy, The Lemon Drop Kid which arrived in cinemas in 1951. Rumour has it that although Evans and Livingstone were reluctant to risk their musical careers by writing what they considered a fluff piece, their careers were in the doldrums and they needed the money. No one could have predicted we’d still be singing “Silver Bells” in 2013.
First released in springtime, it is remarkable the song became a Christmas classic so quickly.Until I heard it again a week ago, I could not have explained why the song was so attached to Christmas in my mind. Only when I delved into the histories of these movies and others I’d watched along the way did I begin to understand the memories I’d bought for sixpence at the Splendid Cinema a mere 10-minute skip from home.
Unrecognized at the time, they had become subconscious markers for some of the milestones in my life: the end of the war shortly after Bing Crosby first recorded “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”; the beginning of my teens; the last year of school in the 1951 of The Lemon Drop Kid; the new job I landed “in the City” in 1954 the year Bing crooned his way into Rosemary Clooney’s heart in the 1954 release of the movie White Christmas.
As the memories swirled around in my attempts to make sense of them for this story, they blended with those of a very different kind of Christmas — and with a recent Lower Mainland news item — an idea was born.
In the early 1980s, I left Vancouver one November for what ended up as a four-month stay in Hawaii. While there, we explored the day-to-day activities of Hawaiians who live in the neighbourhoods outside the oft-maligned touristy areas of Waikiki.
One of our discoveries was the Movie Museum in Honolulu. Close by Ala Moana Beach Park, it is a tiny cinema that seats about two dozen people and shows classic movies; Casablanca was one I remember, but many others were enjoyed during that stay. There was a full house each time we visited and early lineups were already forming for the next showing as we blinked our way out into the soft Hawaiian sunshine.
Could we not treasure and save heritage buildings like Vancouver’s Hollywood Theatre? Or respect the decades of work contributed by local theatrical icon Red Robinson? Could we stage the plays and films of yesteryear in honour of those who had the affection and wisdom to build the theatres? Then, perhaps, we could recapture our memories in the smiles and merry wishes bestowed on us each December by family, friends and strangers alike.
Merry Christmas to all my readers. May all your memories be happy ones!
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