The Christmas Songs: Unwrapping the UK's Chrismas Number 1's

Decorating the tree, sending a wish list to Santa Claus and spending time with your loved ones; falling out over a game of Monopoly or which festive film to watch and waiting in vain for some snow to fall. It’s the wonderful time of the year when we all settle into our holiday traditions as the countdown is on until the big day: the day we find out what song will be number one in the charts at Christmas.

A good festive playlist is an essential part of the build-up to Christmas, and holiday singles and albums have been a staple for major artists dating all the way back to the 1940s. Artists such as Frank Sinatra, Brenda Lee, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat “King” Cole popularised the genre with holiday albums and singles, spreading good cheer to millions around the world in the process.

Indeed, the timeless Irving Berlin song White Christmas is the biggest-selling song of all time with over 100 million copies sold worldwide since it was first written and released for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby (Crosby’s releases of the track – his version of the song from the film and a 1947 re-record - account for over half of the song's all-time sales at around 65 million copies. Incidentally, Crosby is also the singer of the second best-selling Christmas single, as well, with his version of Franz Xaver Gruber composition, Silent Night).

In more recent times artists like Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé have become synonymous with the holiday season – despite the fact that, incredibly, neither one has had a Christmas number one single in the UK – as well as franchises like The X-Factor and John Lewis’ melancholic re-recordings of catalogue songs dominating our screens and charts at this time of year.

Whilst the air in the months of November and December are filled with Christmas music, in shops and on television; on adverts and in the office, Christmas number one's are very rarely actually Christmas songs at all, with only 12 out of the 70 songs to have hit the top of the charts being Christmas-themed.

Indeed, the first three songs to sit at the top of the tree at Christmas weren’t holiday numbers, but regular releases that had done well at the end of the year. The first no. 1 at Christmas in the UK also shares the distinction of being the first no. 1 in the country full-stop.

Before the industry gauged the popularity of a track by how many records, cassettes or CDs it sold or how many times it streamed, popularity was counted by how many copies of sheet music for any given song was sold, but that all changed in 1952.

Percy Dickens had worked in the advertising department for the magazine publishers run by journalist-titan George Newnes, served in the Merchant Navy during the second world war and played in Jazz bands around London with fellow journalist Benny Green before finding himself in once again in advertising for Melody Maker in the late 1940s. Whilst Melody Maker was seen as the pre-eminent music trade paper for music professionals, their tastes and attitudes were too stiff for Percy who struck out with the backing of Maurice Kinn and help from editor Ray Sonin to found an alternative publication, The New Musical Express, also in 1952.

Coming from an advertising background, Percy knew that an air of competition would attract the attention and advertising revenue from the burgeoning record industry and its executives. As well as the idea for a new weekly publication, Percy had had the idea for a new musical chart system, too, to monitor the popularity of new recordings and releases. Phoning record shops around the country to find out which discs were selling the most, Percy Dickens compiled the data into a top 12 format, before expanding this to a top 20.

The first chart hit the shelves on November 14th, 1952, in time for Christmas and the first track to hit the top spot was Al Martino’s epic Here in My Heart.

Al’s enormous vocal miraculously holds its own against the lush orchestration and brass ensemble that accompanies him. He fluctuates between powerhouse hollering and gentle crooning as he sings the words written earlier in the year by Pat Genaro, Lou Levinson, and Bill Borrelli; starting like a rocket and yet still somehow rising to a crescendo from there at the end of the song.

The next two years saw another ballad and an instrumental top the charts for Christmas – the tender Answer Me by Frankie Laine and the toe-tapping rollick Let’s Have Another Party from piano maestro Winifred Atwell – before Christmas saw a true Christmas number one for the first time.

Christmas Alphabet was written in 1954 by Buddy Kaye and Jules Loman and was first released by The McGuire Sisters later that year, but it was a version by British pop singer Dickie Valentine that topped the charts. First entering the UK singles charts on November 25th 1955, it remained one of the top-selling discs in the country for seven weeks, including three at the summit. The song spells out the word Christmas and what each letter represents – C is for Candy, H is for Happiness; T is for Toys and Trees so Tall whilst S is for Santa Claus of course – and whilst a cute idea, restricts itself in scope and so spells the word out twice over pleasant melody and accompaniment before wrapping up.

Two years later in 1957, Harry Belafonte joined Dickie Valentine in having a Christmas-themed UK Christmas number one with Mary’s Boy Child but then no one would repeat the feat for another 16 years. The year-end charts were dominated in the ’60s by The Beatles (in the 60 years since, no one has accrued more Christmas No. 1’s than the fab four’s fab four. Paul McCartney would hit the top spot again in the following decade with Wings and their A-Side Mull of Kintyre, but only got to number six with his actual Christmas song, Wonderful Christmastime in 1979), as well as hits for Danny Williams (Moon River), Elvis Presley (Return to Sender) and Tom Jones (Green, Green Grass of Home).

Slade hit the glam heights of number one in 1973 with Merry Xmas Everybody and briefly sparked a chain reaction as 1974, 1976 and 1978 also saw yuletide tunes end the year at the top of the pops with Lonely This Christmas by Mud, When a Child is Born by Jonny Mathis and Mary’s Boy Child by Bony M respectively in pole-position, the latter becoming the first song to be number one at Christmas on more than one occasion.

Over the years, this pattern has repeated with the holiday tracks clustered in groups and then seeing years go by where novelty songs from Mr. Blobby or Bob the Builder were more likely to claim the top spot. Thanks to the dominance of the X-Factor, the accommodation of streaming figures into chart calculations and the viral success of the novelty act LadBaby, who raises money for The Trussell Trust in their bid to end the need for food banks in the country with his food-pun based releases, the UK hasn’t seen a true Christmas song top the Christmas charts for almost twenty years.

With the countdown to Christmas well and truly underway, who knows what this year will bring?