Prior to the Song?
They seemed to, at least back in the days of Currier and Ives.
Why would anyone write a song about dreaming of a white Christmas if nobody wanted one? Where would the recognition factor be?
The original version had an opening verse that is usually left out. It’s about being in sunny California on xmas eve and being wistful about being back home where it is ordinarily cold and snowy.
It may well be the origin of the term.
That’s the origin of the song, but the phrase predates it by quite a but. Google shows a book by than name ten years before the song was written, and I doubt that’s the first.
Great cite. Thanks.
Who was the audience for that movie? In 1942, probably half the population lived in the snow belt. The Holiday Inn of the movie’s title was a Connecticut farmhouse. White Christmases were the real expression of the holiday. California was a distant and ephemeral substitute. The movie ends with the leads reunited in Connecticut and planning on staying there.
Snow at Christmas was part of American secular mythology. It goes back much earlier than Currier and Ives. How about “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, aka “The Night Before Christmas” from 1823? And that obviously played upon recognition as well. The vast majority of Americans then (especially white Americans, the ones who were literate) lived with white Christmases. Sleighs and snow were familiar symbols of winter and therefore of Christmas. Heck, the whole Valley Forge winter would have been beaten into every child’s head in school.
The song merely codified what everybody already thought was the true, proper image of Christmas: show-dappled but sunshiny, filled with the joys of children and presents, a time to reflect on what was good in your life. Sappy as all hell, but that was Irving Berlin’s hallmark. He knew what sold to the goyim. 
Berlin was living in California when he wrote it. He may have been sappy, but he wrote from personal experience almost always. In fact, his song “Always” was written to his wife, not to suit a sentimental audience. “White Christmas” wasn’t even all that popular at first, but eventually became the biggest selling single of all time, a record that still stands.
Not that popular, possibly because the movie was released in the spring. By the end of October 1942 it was the number one song in the country and would stay that way until 1943. It also won the Oscar for Best Song. Not too shabby.
Cecil had a column talking about nostalgia for Victorian Christmas celebrations. I’d expect that love of a “white Christmas” goes back at least that far.
Agreed. Charles Dickens was very influential in establishing the traditional Christmas.
What’s interesting is the idea of a traditional Christmas with snow and yule logs and dodgy knitted sweaters and so on is still part of the Christmas imagery in places like Australia and New Zealand - where Christmas is in summer and in Australia, at least, it’s frequently over 30 degrees celsius.
I attribute that orignally to our British heritage, and in more recent years American movies and TV shows - although surely the idea of a white Christmas must seem pretty odd to people living in San Diego or Honululu or Miami too.
And it’s likely an accident of climate history (for Dickens) and human calendars (for the general tradition): FromQI, my emphases:
There happened to be snow every Christmas of the first eight years of Charles Dickens’ life, which probably explains why white Christmases are a consistent feature of his stories. His snowy childhood has its origins in the colder climate of the period 1550-1850 when Britain was in the grip of a ‘Little Ice Age’. Winters were particularly persistent and severe - 1813-14 was the last winter that a ‘frost fair’ was held on the frozen River Thames in London. **Before the change of calendar in 1752, which effectively brought Christmas day back by 12 days, snow was even more likely **as Christmas comes at the beginning of the season for snow. Wintry weather is more likely in January.
I read somewhere that Bing Crosby had a real problem with the song and originally refused to sing it, because he was religious and found a song about Christmas as a holiday rather than a carol about he holy day to be a bit too irreverent and commercializing.
Could we have a cite for this?
Maybe you’re confusing “White Christmas” with “Adeste Fideles” or “Silent Night.” In the book Call Me Lucky by Crosby and his ghostwriter Pete Martin, pp 141-42, Crosby says that he didn’t feel he had the stature to sing a religious song like “Adeste Fideles” but got convinced that it had become a carol. He also didn’t want to make money off of “Silent Night” so he sent all the proceeds to a charity. But by the time of “White Christmas” he just sang the song as a song.
Got a clip? I’m having trouble getting those lyrics to fit the melody I have in my head.
Song intros of that sort are not in the melody of the song proper.
They were called the “verse” and the part that survived was known as the “chorus”
Here’s a version with the introduction.
Only a vague cite, but I seem to remember seeing an exhibit at the Globe in London about Shakespeariana which mentioned that Frost Fairs were the result of bridges that restricted flow on the Thames, which allowed ice to build up. Once the flow of the Thames was opened up the era of Frost Fairs was over. The Little Ice Age and the snowy weather of course was a real climactic occurence, but the frozen Thames was a human creation.