What’s the connection between Silver Bells, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, A Holly Jolly Christmas, The Secret of Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and White Christmas?
They were all written by Jewish songwriters.
And that this trend hadn’t really received a lot of coverage got writer/producer Jason Charters thinking.
“When I learned about some of these songs, everybody knows White Christmas and a lot of people know it’s Irving Berlin and a lot of people know that Irving Berlin was Jewish. But Sammy Cahn and Johnny Marks and Gloria Shayne Baker and Mel Tormé and Jay Livingston and Ray Evans … all wrote these wonderful Christmas songs, and I couldn’t believe that nobody had actually told this story before,” Charters told the Calgary Eyeopener.
And the documentary Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas was born.
Jewish mom, Anglican dad
“I grew up with these two traditions,” he explained.
“My mom is Jewish and my dad is Anglican. For the first 10 years of my life, we celebrated Christmas. And when I was 11, we started vacationing down in Florida with my Jewish side of the family and Christmas became going to a Chinese restaurant on Christmas Day and then going to see a movie. Wrestling with what to do at Christmas time, reconciling these two sides of my family, has been something that has been with me forever.”
Charters says it’s a story of connection between two worlds, for many of the songwriters.
“Through this movie we were able to return people to the fact that these were great songwriters, but they were also immigrants or the children of Jewish immigrants. They were newcomers and they brought with them this sense of longing for what they had left behind, or what their parents had left behind. They had this sense of needing to belong to this new world and being outsiders to it, and I think they put all of that into this music. That is something everybody can relate to. I don’t think you have to be Jewish to relate to the feelings in these songs.”
There are stories behind each of the songs, Charters said.
“It was one of the last of these great Christmas songs,” he said of Do You Hear What I Hear?
“It was written by a woman named Gloria Shayne Baker and her husband. She was a Jewish woman from Brookline, Mass. She grew up next to John F. Kennedy. She wrote Do You Hear What I Hear? as a response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is actually a protest song. It is one of the very few Christmas songs written by a Jewish songwriter that actually talks about Jesus Christ. It’s the biblical story of the birth of Jesus Christ. When you understand it was actually written in response to this threat of nuclear destruction, it takes on a whole new, very profound meaning.”