People who argue that Christmas seems to come earlier every year now have an important piece of evidence: the earliest ever appearance of Christmas songs in the UK Top 40.
We’re not halfway through November, but already the widely agreed-upon pair of greatest modern Christmas classics – Wham!’s Last Christmas and Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You – have entered the chart at No 37 and No 40 respectively. Last year, it took until the third week of November for a Christmas song to appear, namely All I Want for Christmas Is You. Each song will now almost certainly remain in the chart for the rest of the year, and possibly early 2024.
The songs’ popularity has grown all the more via the network effect of the download and then streaming eras, with Last Christmas – originally a No 2 hit in 1984 – reappearing in the chart every year since 2008, eventually earning its first No 1 position in January 2021.
Released in 1994, All I Want for Christmas Is You also returned in 2008, and earned its first No 1 spot slightly before Wham!, in December 2020.
Further demonstrating the songs’ classic status is the fact there are no other Christmas hits even in the Top 100 this week, though by Christmas itself the charts will be dominated by them.
Twenty-nine entries in the UK Top 40 over Christmas 2022 were festive, with longstanding favourites such as Brenda Lee’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree and the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York joined by a more recent established canon of favourites by Michael Bublé, Ariana Grande, Kelly Clarkson and Justin Bieber.
Neither Last Christmas nor All I Want for Christmas Is You has held the actual Christmas No 1 spot, which in recent years has been dominated by YouTube star LadBaby and his series of singles to benefit food bank charity the Trussell Trust. His fifth chart-topper, 2022’s Food Aid, broke the Beatles’ record for the most Christmas No 1s. He has not announced whether he’ll attempt a sixth No 1 in a row this year.
The festive glow of All I Want for Christmas Is You has been slightly dulled this year as Mariah Carey has been served with a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement over the song.
Songwriter Andy Stone penned a thematically and lyrically similar song of the same name and released it with his group Vince Vance & the Valiants in 1989. Stone’s lawyers allege the song title is “distinctive” and “the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50% clone of [Stone’s] original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions … Carey has, without licensing, palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own.”
Carey has not publicly responded to the lawsuit. She continues to embrace the song’s popularity, launching a new range of festive merchandise and a Christmas tour in the US, which begins on 15 November.
