While Mariah Carey and Wham! dominate the airwaves each December, the true soundtrack of the season is often deeply personal. Writers from across generations at the Guardian have shared the songs that conjure their most vivid Christmas memories, revealing a festive playlist far beyond the usual chart-toppers.
The Underground and the Unexpected
For some, the festive spirit is found in the most unlikely places. Writer Archie Forde highlights Cookin’ Soul’s ‘Doom Xmas’, an internet cult classic that reworks the music of late cult rapper MF Doom into Christmas anthems. This bootlegged project, featuring chaotic flips of Grinch soundtracks and a chopped-and-screwed Nat King Cole, has become a defiant annual ritual for a community of underground rap fans. It stands as a human-centric antidote to the age of AI-generated music.
For Olive Pometsey, the constant is unequivocally Mariah Carey. Her voice scores a tapestry of memories: from childhood car journeys lit by kaleidoscopic lights, to teenage drives blasting ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ after a friend passed his test, to decorating a first Christmas tree with a future husband to the sound of Carey’s ‘funky’ ‘Here Comes Santa Claus’.
Festive Nightmares and Cheesy Alternatives
Not all memories are sweet. For Laura Snapes, the aggressively rousing French chorus of ‘Chante, C’est Noël’ is the soundtrack to a freezing 2003 family trip to Disneyland Paris. The song became a family joke, one her father exploited by buying the CD and playing it on repeat during the long drive home, much to his children’s horror. To this day, its opening bells induce a recoil.
Seeking an alternative to the polite original, Ben Beaumont-Thomas champions El Vez’s cover of ‘Feliz Navidad’. The Latino Elvis impersonator’s sweaty, frantic version, discovered on a 2000 XFM compilation, outshines José Feliciano’s now-ubiquitous staple for him, injecting a giddy, childlike energy into the season.
Classic Rock and Lounge Cheese
For Alexis Petridis, Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is intrinsically linked to Christmas 1975, when it was the festive number one. The song’s striking sound is forever entwined with the memory of a sparkly, artificial 1970s tree, its lights reflecting in baubles like disco balls, creating a magical childhood moment that defines the season’s feeling.
In other households, the soundtrack is one of laid-back sophistication. Lloyd Bradley’s yuletide is scored by lounge and light jazz legends like Dean Martin and Ella Fitzgerald. He singles out Lena Horne’s ‘Jingle All the Way’ for its irresistible ‘big band in dub’ energy, and Miles Davis’s cynically brilliant ‘Blue Christmas’ for the regretfully over-refreshed.
Finally, John Fordham finds a lifelong fascination in the Rossetti/Holst carol ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, mesmerised by its snowbound atmospherics even in a non-religious childhood home. His festive guitar playing contrasts it with the cheesy but timeless jazz of his hero Wes Montgomery’s ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’.
These personal selections prove that the spirit of Christmas is often best captured not by the universal hit, but by the song that, for reasons joyful, traumatic, or simply cheesy, becomes the indelible background score to our own festive stories.
