When I was taking piano lessons, there was a bunch of sheet music to songs from the 1940s in the piano bench.

I assumed that my mother put them there, but I’m not sure just how she came by them because she had never played the piano herself, at least as far as I knew.

Anyway, one of them was the original sheet music to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”, which included the verse, which hardly anybody ever sings:

The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, LA
But it’s December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up north.

I’ve always liked that verse because it sets up the song very nicely. But the song was introduced during the war years, and it meant even more to those who were overseas.

In this video Dominic Broomfield-McHugh tells not only the story of one of the most iconic Christmas songs ever written, but also, well, watch the video. There’s a reason I didn’t wait until the holiday season because most of it isn’t really about the holiday.