The Top 10 Best Christmas Songs
1. All I Want for Christmas Is You, Mariah Carey (1994)
The modern queen of Christmas music. Written in an afternoon and recorded in August, it has become the most streamed Christmas song ever and returns to the top of the charts every December. The wall-of-sound production nods to the 1960s, but the hook is pure pop perfection.
2. White Christmas, Bing Crosby (1942)
Irving Berlin's wistful ballad, sung by Bing Crosby, is the best selling single of all time in any genre. Recorded during wartime, its longing for home hit soldiers overseas hard, and it has never lost that quiet emotional pull.
3. The Christmas Song, Nat King Cole (1946)
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Mel Tormé and Bob Wells wrote it during a heat wave, trying to think cool thoughts. Nat King Cole's velvet delivery made it the definitive fireside Christmas record, and no one has sung it better since.
4. Last Christmas, Wham! (1984)
George Michael wrote, produced and played nearly everything on this synth-pop heartbreak classic. It spent decades as the biggest UK single never to hit number one, finally getting there in 2021. The melancholy under the sleigh bells is what makes it last.
5. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Judy Garland (1944)
Introduced by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis, this is the great bittersweet Christmas song. The lyric was actually softened from a much darker original draft, and that tension between comfort and sadness still comes through in every good cover.
6. Fairytale of New York, The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl (1987)
A drunken argument set on Christmas Eve, sung by Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl. It is messy, funny and devastating, everything most Christmas songs are not, and it regularly tops polls of the best Christmas song ever in the UK and Ireland.
7. Jingle Bell Rock, Bobby Helms (1957)
The song that fused rock and roll with Christmas and made it stick. Bobby Helms recorded it just before Christmas 1957, and its twangy guitar riff has opened holiday parties ever since. Sixty-plus years later it still charts every December.
8. It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Andy Williams (1963)
Big band swagger and pure enthusiasm. Andy Williams recorded it for his first Christmas album and it became the sound of holiday specials, shopping trips and every montage of December ever filmed. Nothing says the season has officially started quite like it.
9. Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, Brenda Lee (1958)
Brenda Lee was only 13 when she recorded this rockabilly party starter. It took years to catch on, then never left. In recent years it has returned to the very top of the US charts each December, more than six decades after release.
10. Silent Night, Franz Xaver Gruber and Joseph Mohr (1818)
First performed in an Austrian village church in 1818, Silent Night is the most recorded Christmas song in history and a UNESCO-recognized piece of cultural heritage. Bing Crosby's 1935 recording is among the best selling singles ever. Every quiet Christmas moment belongs to it.