Judy Garland’s Good Tidings - "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas"

 

When Garland sang ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ in a film more than 75 years ago, she was consoling a nation at war; today, the song speaks as powerfully to a country beleaguered by Covid-19.

By Bob Greene

December 21, 2020, print edition of The Wall Street Journal

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Appeared in the 

“She was singing on the set of a motion picture that was being produced in wartime. She could have had no idea that her words would carry such present-tense power more than 75 years later.

The movie wasn’t about war—it was a musical about a Midwestern family, set in the early 1900s. The film, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” was released in 1944, and its star, Judy Garland, sang the words to Margaret O’Brien, who was playing her little sister.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, let your heart be light.

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.…

It was exactly what Americans, weary from the years of World War II, needed to hear: those words of hope—the promise that in the next year all, at last, would be well. From phonographs in living rooms and radios near battlefields, the words to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” comforted mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, soldiers alone in the dark.

The song, written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, reached inside listeners like an electrical jolt to their hearts. The soldiers and their families had been apart for holiday after holiday. They had said goodbye before the young men had boarded the packed ships that would transport them to faraway war zones; the only way to keep in touch was through the mail, and with combat raging that was sporadic at best. No telephone calls, not during that war; the families hadn’t heard each other’s voices for years. Then, with another Christmas approaching, there was a different voice, Judy Garland’s, speaking to, and for, all of them:

Next year all our troubles will be miles away.…

The song became a holiday standard; for a version in the 1950s, in peacetime, Frank Sinatra had the lyrics watered down a bit, to de-emphasize the baseline sense of deprivation. Some of the more pensive phrases were replaced with cheery words about decorating a Christmas tree.

But as Christmas approaches in 2020 it is the original that can cause listeners to pause and ponder what they have gone through in the long months since last Christmas. If, when the song was new, it brought a tender, fragile look to the eyes of its listeners, it is having a similar effect now, in a country in many ways changed yet at its core much the same as it ever was. In this year of so much illness and death, when we have been warned against surrounding ourselves with loved ones at the gatherings we always took for granted, there are those haunting words of yearning, over all the decades:

Once again as in olden days, happy golden days of yore,

Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us, once more.…

What is it that we have in common with those Americans of the 1940s? Their ordeal, after all, was quite different from ours. Perhaps the connective thread is just this: the knowledge that the lives we take on faith, the daily assumptions about the world around us, can be yanked away so quickly by uninvited forces that overwhelm us. Which is why, as we are admonished to keep our distance, those words, in a fresh yet familiar context, can stop us in our tracks:

Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow,

Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.…

What is the message, as we do our best to muddle through this cold December? Probably the same as it was in 1944 — nothing more simple, or more complicated, than this: Have yourself a merry little Christmas now.”

—Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”