I know my East Coast and Southern friends are digging out from under, so I hope they don’t hate me for this. Eric Clapton plays and sings “White Christmas” in a way you’ve never heard before.

The song has a fascinating history: Irving Berlin wrote it in either 1940 or 1941. The first public performance of it was by Bing Crosby on his Christmas Day radio show in 1941. Crosby recorded it in May of 1942 and it was released as part of a 78-rpm six-disc collection of songs from the movie “Holiday Inn.” Among the songs from that film it was initially outshone by “Be Careful, It’s My Heart,” but by the end of October of ’42 it was at the top of the Your Hit Parade charts and stayed there until after the New Year. It won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1942 and was later given the ultimate accolade: an entire movie, 1954’s “White Christmas,” was built around it. 

PBS’s The News Hour noted in a 2015 segment:

…the whole idea of secular Christmas songs really didn’t exist before Berlin. No one was actually dreaming of white Christmases before him.

Composers and publishers thought, why write a Christmas song? They will only play it once a year. But, in fact, the success of this actually launched a whole genre of secular Christmas songs. And all of a sudden, we invented an American Christmas based on a mythic golden past that never existed in this rural New England that came purely out of his imagination.

I recommend watching all six minutes of that segment if you’re interested in how composers work.