Something appears to be ready to happen in Nashville for Christmas Day that hasn't been seen since the days of Sing-Out South. That's 41 years ago in 1969.
A White Christmas!
Forecasters say the city could get at least a couple of inches beginning late Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day. Technically, Nashville had a White Christmas in 1993, but that was only for about three-tenths of an inch. The last time we had appreciable snow was in 1969 when we received almost 3 inches.
I remember that Christmas. It was my first year in college and I had gone to Midnight Mass at the Cathedral with several of my Sing-Out friends. It was just raining hard at that time. So when I went to bed, I thought we'd missed out again on the white stuff. Nashville has had a White Christmas only a handful of times during my life. But when I awoke to join my little brothers and sisters to see what Santa Claus brought, there was this wonderland of white outside.
My father's favorite singer was Bing Crosby and it wasn't the holiday season until he got out his White Christmas album and began to play the title song. In 1969, with all the snow on the ground outside, it seemed like a dream come true, just as Bing sang it (after Irving Berlin wrote it) for the movies so many years ago....
Bing Crosby - White Christmas
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While we didn't have snow very often for Christmas, during our time growing up in Nashville in the 1960s, we did have a lot of Christmas traditions, beginning with the annual Christmas Parade held on the first Sunday of December.
In 1966, the parade featured Sing-Out South as we entertained tens of thousands of Nashvillians as we rode on a float in the parade. We also darn near froze to death as it was quite cold that day as I remember it.
Not far from the Christmas Parade site, thousands of people every year,during the 1950s and '60s, came to Centennial Park to see the annual Nativity Scene, sponsored by the city and Harvey's Department Store, in front of the Parthenon. While it would never work today putting a Christian symbol in front of a pagan temple in a government owned public park, none of that was an issue in those days. Just the beauty of the scence that made it a special Nashville Christmas treat every year.
While the Parthenon Nativity scene eventually just wore out from age and weather exposure in the late 1960s, the tradition of special Christmas lights continues in Nashville with the annual holidays displays (and special holiday shows) at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. To see this year's display is especially moving for Nashvillians because the Hotel was damaged by the terrible May Floods and closed for several months, opening just in time for the holidays and those special lights!
Another Nashville Christmas tradition still going strong to this very day is holiday caroling to raise money for the Fannie Battle Day Home. I can remember going caroling with Sing-Out friends, especially in Patty Mayer Higgins' neighborhood on Christmas Eve, 1968. What made it particularly memorable was coming in for hot chocolate just in time to watch the Apollo VIII astronauts on TV, orbiting the moon for the first time in history and reading from the Bible and the Book of Genesis...
When you look back, Nashville was clearly a wonderful community to grow up in, with many great Christmas traditions that continue in one fashion or another to the present time. No wonder, there is something of a Christmas song that speaks to it.
Here's Nashville's own Amy Grant, appearing with her former husband Steven Chapman in 1986 on the TONIGHT SHOW with Johnny Carson,singing a Tennessee Christmas....
Merry Christmas, everyone from what many hope to be a snowy Tennessee Christmas for 2010!
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