....His thumbnail history of American popular music helpfully delineates a crucial shift in taste around the time ''White Christmas'' first landed on the Hit Parade. The urbane, modern 30's sensibility, as represented by songwriters like Cole Porter and George Gershwin and by performers like Fred Astaire, was yielding to a softer, more sentimental and nostalgic mood. The shift was summed up by the transformation of the witty, acerbic Rodgers and Hart into the cozy, idealizing Rodgers and Hammerstein. ''White Christmas'' was, significantly, the first Christmas song to become a hit. Rosen also notes that the classic Christmas songs and movies of the '40s and '50s were largely the work of Jews:

His discussion hinges on the urge of the Lower East Side immigrants to assimilate into the larger society. But assimilation could cut two ways, and Rosen quotes a hilariously malicious passage from Philip Roth's novel ''Operation Shylock'': ''God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin 'Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas.' The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both!

....Contrary to Roth, the American Christmas never really was a celebration of the divinity of Christ. As it took shape in the 19th century, it was always an occasion focused on family gatherings, tree trimmings and the exchange of gifts. The more it evolved into a public holiday, something that began to occur around the end of the 19th century, the more secular it had to become: government offices, after all, cannot close in honor of Jesus' putative birthday. Irving Berlin contributed to a process that was under way long before he started dreaming of precipitation, a process that continues today and can be expected to accelerate as millions of non-Western, non-Christian people pour into the country.

So Berlin contributed the theme song for the secularization of Christmas, which may be a good or bad trend depending upon your perspective, but it sure is a great song.