The Guardian was so cheeky to ask, and Noddy Holder was so cool to (kind of) answer the question about the amount of money he makes from the 1973 hit single 'Merry Xmas Everybody' he released with the Slade. “It’s like having a hit record every year. So it’s a nice pension plan, I’ll say that” - Holder says. Guardian quotes The PRS, who reported £512,000 annually for Holder from the Christmas hit, whereas the Daily Mail goes with a £1m.

"Christmas songs vary hugely in genre – you’ve got everything from Songs-of-Praise-core to “Mad World” – and as you will see throughout this list, we are not afraid to challenge boundaries and perceptions. (One of the songs included, for example, doesn’t actually exist.) Not all Christmas songs mention Christmas, and not all Christmas songs are even “songs” as you may know them. Your mother screaming at you to get the dog out of the living room while there’s ham out, say, is just as much a Christmas ditty as “Silent Night” herself. You may not be able to play all our choices on your little Spotify, but they are all undoubtedly Christmas songs in that they contribute to the sounds and the mildly deranged mood of the season" - Vice kind of argues in favor of its list of 50 best Christmas songs. A mad list.

Wham!'s festive song 'Last Christmas' has topped the UK singles chart for the first time, 36 years after it was first released, the Official Charts reports. The Christmas classic was streamed 9.2 million times over the last week, knocking LadBaby's 'Don't Stop Me Eating' off the top spot. The song was first released in December 1984, it has returned to the top 10 a further six times, and now holds a new chart record - for the longest time taken for a single to reach number one.

Kanye West released a surprise EP 'Emmanuel' performed by Sunday Service on Christmas Day, Rolling Stone reports. The new project, executive produced and composed by West, arrives as a "celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ". It's five tracks of acapella songs in Latin.

“Christmas songs shouldn’t only be this performative optimism. They should contain a grain of melancholy. Especially in 2020, it’s tone deaf to say, ‘Oh Christmas is all going to be ‘happy happy’. I try to live in the real world” - Chilly Gonzales told The Independent about his "sad" holiday album 'A Very Chilly Christmas'. There are others from the indie-rock world that felt the urge to add some sadness to Christmas - Mark Lanegan, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, Calexico...

"OK, Mariah's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' is obviously the most canonical new Christmas song of the last 30 years. But what's the second?" - rock critic Christopher R. Weingarten asked on his Twitter. Plenty of answers in his feed.

Half of the titles among the top 10 on the Billboard 200 chart are Christmas albums for the first time since 2013, Billboard reports. It's Michael Bublé’s 'Christmas', Carrie Underwood’s 'My Gift', Nat King Cole’s 'The Christmas Song', Pentatonix’s 'The Best of Pentatonix Christmas', and Mariah Carey’s 'Merry Christmas'. The top spot of the week is taken by Shawn Mendes and his 'Wonder' with 89,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Dec. 10.

Mariah Carey’s festive hit 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' reaches Number 1 on the Official UK Singles Chart 26 years after its release, and breaks a record in the process, the Official Charts Company reports. Upon its original release in 1994, 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' peaked at Number 2, below East 17’s 'Stay Another Day'. Carey's hit summits in its 70th week in the Top 40, and sets a new chart record - no other song has spent more weeks in the Official Chart Top 40 before eventually reaching Number 1 in UK chart history. The song notched up 10.8 million streams over the last seven days – the most streams in a week by any song in 2020 so far.

There’s Christmas cheer up and down the Official UK Singles Chart, with 21 songs among the Top 40, the Chart reports. Mariah Carey holds the highest spot, with her 1994 Christmas single 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' logging at No. 2. Wham's 'Last Christmas' climbs 17 places to No. 3, while The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s 'Fairytale of New York' zooms 26-8. Further 18 more holiday hits - including songs by John Lennon, Elton John, Band Aid, Chris Rea - impact the Top 40.

"The changing of the word ‘faggot’ for the nonsense word ‘haggard’ destroys the song by deflating it right at its essential and most reckless moment, stripping it of its value" - Nick Cave wrote on his blog after BBC announced that Radio 1 would be playing an alternate version of The Pogues' 'Fairytale of New York'. With this change "it becomes a song that has been tampered with, compromised, tamed, and neutered and can no longer be called a great song. It is a song that has lost its truth, its honour and integrity".

Mariah Carey's 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' returned to Spotify's Top 40 last Sunday - a full two weeks earlier than three years ago, and it also reappeared on the iTunes chart on 2 November, BBC reports. Behind her in the Spotify chart are six more Christmas songs, including The Pogues' 'Fairytale of New York' and Michael Bublé's 'It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas'. However, listeners in countries like Estonia and Iceland started shuffling their Christmas playlists in October, and in the Philippines as early as - September.

Twenty-three songs have been in the top half of Billboard’s Holiday 100 nearly every week since the list began in 2011, with 15 of them being written before 1970, and only 1 of the top 23 holiday songs was released this century, and it’s a cover of a song written in 1951, Washington Post writes […]

Mariah Carey's classic Christmas song 'All I Want For Christmas is You' has topped the US charts - 25 years after it was first released, Billboard reports. When the hit song made its debut in 1994 it was as an EP and not a single, meaning it wasn't allowed to compete in Billboard's Hot 100. […]

There's better music than Christmas music, but if we have to listen to some of it, it should be good. Rolling Stone combed through it and found - Sufjan Stevens, Weezer, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Motown, Cee Lo etc.

“The word was used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak and with her character... Her dialogue is as accurate as I could make it but she is not intended to offend! She is just supposed to be an authentic character and not all characters in songs and stories are […]

Ireland is currently sparring over its holiday classic, The Pogues’ 'Fairytale of New York', namely its use of a word "faggot". It’s important to remember that the word itself is ensconced in the character and speech of a particularly volatile character within the song, and is not a declaration from singer Shane MacGowan. Consequence of […]

American radio station Star 102 banned christmas song 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' because it's seen as unsuitable in the #MeToo era. The band has reignited a debate about the song, and raised questions about other potentially questionable Christmas classics. A former English teacher wrote a feminist defence of the song in a viral Tumblr post, suggesting the […]

A radio station in Cleveland has decided to stop playing the popular holiday song 'Baby, It’s Cold Outside', citing listener concerns about predatory undertones in the lyrics. The song, which was originally written by Frank Loesser in 1944, is a call-and-response duet in which a man tries to convince a woman to stay the night. “I […]