As of this writing, the most popular song in America is Brenda Lee’s 1958 classic “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” known to millennials from the scene in “Home Alone” when Kevin McCallister scares off the burglars by staging a mannequin Christmas shindig that, frankly, looks better than any holiday party I’ve ever attended.
Lee, who is 79 and seems delightful, has been on the promo trail, filming a new video for the 65-year-old song and making TV appearances to celebrate having become the oldest living artist to score a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.
“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is now the song with the longest journey by far from the date of its release to the top of the chart. It surpasses Mariah Carey’s 1994 classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” which has hit No. 1 each of the last four Decembers. (Carey has been gracious about Lee’s achievement, but is surely sharpening a knife somewhere.)
The dueling Christmas divas have plenty of company. This week a dozen of Billboard’s top 20 singles are holiday songs spanning the decades: Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” (1957), Burl Ives’ “Holly Jolly Christmas” (1965), Wham!’s “Last Christmas” (1986), Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” (2014) and so on.
Until recently, Christmas music almost never registered on the pop charts. That changed after Billboard in the early 2010s lifted its prohibition on “catalog” (i.e. old) music from appearing on the Hot 100 and, a few years later, began counting audio and video streams. This creates a far more accurate picture of a song’s popularity than simply tallying sales in various formats.
“Rather than knowing how many times a piece of music is purchased, streaming data allows us to know how many times it has been listened to,” the writer Chris Dalla Riva explains in a recent edition of his music-data newsletter, Can’t Get Much Higher. “The historical equivalent would be if Billboard was tracking how many times you spun a song on your record player.”
The data says people listen to Christmas music far more often than they buy it, which makes sense. Nobody needs to pay for holiday music; it exists ambiently this time of year. We’ll play old Christmas albums during family gatherings, shuffle a Spotify playlist while decorating or suffer through “Jingle Bells” every time we set foot in a store.
The rise of streaming exacerbates a quirk of music history. Many performers with long and varied careers — Bing Crosby, Jose Feliciano, Nat King Cole, Darlene Love, Vince Guaraldi, etc. — find themselves reduced in the public memory to the size of a single holiday hit, a phenomenon explained in deliciously nerdy detail in a 2021 episode of “Hit Parade,” the podcast hosted by music-chart analyst Chris Molanphy.
It is unlikely future generations will come to think of Paul McCartney primarily as the performer of “Wonderful Christmastime,” but few people in the 1960s would have predicted that destiny for Lee — who is, for lack of a better term, a total badass.
She recorded her now signature song at age 13, already several years into a career that would span genres and decades. Lee navigated the tricky path from teen idol to adult artist, outlasting peers and making hits well into the 1980s, earning the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite” thanks to both her explosive voice and diminutive stature.
She was the first female dual-inductee into the Rock and Roll and Country Music Halls of Fame. During the ‘60s, Lee charted more songs in America than anyone besides the Beatles, Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, all of whom were admirers. (When she toured Europe in the early ‘60s, the Beatles opened for HER.)
So, while Lee’s Christmas-specific moment in the sun is well-deserved, she should have been a cultural icon this entire time. There are 11 other months of the year when we can make that happen.