I Didn't Know That - Still hate the song but the story is moving and so interesting

Sometimes Christmas is not what it is supposed to be. Neither merry nor white. If the world is full of joy, we cannot see it. Peace eludes earth, and we cannot hear the angels sing.

On Christmas morning 1928 they discovered their infant son, born earlier that December, dead in his crib of what would come to be known as sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Born Ellin Mackay, the infant’s mother was Catholic. The father, Irving Berlin, was a Russian-born Jew, the son of an orthodox cantor.

Like so many other songs that he wrote, the melancholy words and melody of “White Christmas” percolated for some time before Mr. Berlin found a purpose for them: “Holiday Inn,” a movie about “a retired trouper who buys a farm, and when farming doesn’t work out, turns the farm into an inn that open only on holidays.” It would star Paramount’s newest sensation, the crooner Bing Crosby.

“Holiday Inn,” which premiered in August of 1942, was a hit but as for the score’s centerpiece, the tune in which Berlin had invested so much hope, the collective silence was deafening. The New York Time’s review mentioned “White Christmas” only in passing, calling it “tender”; the Herald Tribune called it “tuneful”; and Variety failed to mention it at all.

In Irving Berlin: New York Genius (2019), biographer James Kaplan notes that Mr. Crosby’s Decca recording of the song entered the Lucky Strike Hit Parade in the spring of 1942 at number 10 but stalled at two. Then, quite unexpectedly,

“White Christmas,” which Berlin had deliberately chosen not to promote at the outset, preferring to wait until the commencement of the holiday season (in those sweetly innocent times, after Thanksgiving), started to sell like crazy, on record and in sheet music. In August. By mid-September, “our number one song without any plugs.” By the first week of October it stood at the top of the Hit Parade, and—with recordings by the Freddy Martin Orchestra and Dinah Shore joining Crosby’s—Billboard proclaimed “White Christmas” “one of the most phenomenal hits in the history of the music business.”

Why did “White Christmas” smash the charts? And in the summer of 1942? Because America had been plunged into war the previous December. Her prospects on the battlefield were grim. That summer thousands of young Americans found themselves half a globe away from home, facing a Christmas that most likely would not be merry and quite certainly would not be white. The song spoke to the G.I.’s and to their families at home.
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And so is the longer article that begins with that story.