Talk:It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Another version

I think that the version of this song most frequently heard is by 'Point of Grace' from the Hallmark "Home for the Holidays' album. I may be wrong, but I think that was the version used in the Staples' commercials. 24.27.31.170 (talk) 17:04, 29 October 2011 (UTC) Eric

Actually, the original 1963 version by Andy Williams is still the most-played version on radio. If you scan through the recent archives of the weekly Billboard Holiday Songs chart at Billboard magazine's website, you'll see that the Andy Williams version is the one that regularly charts, and is most often the highest-charting version.--Sliv812 (talk) 06:11, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

Andy Williams versions

I have run across two Andy Williams versions that both sound the almost the same. One runs ~2:15 plus 0:03 of silence at the end. It is mono until the very end, when stereo reverb kicks in for the last note. At 1:38 into the song, Andy does a weird, strained "run" with his voice. The other version is a ~2:29 stereo remix with an overdubbed choir providing backup. The choir takes over and sings the "there'll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting, and caroling out in the snow" lines, whereas in the other, Andy sings it. This remix was on the 1973 JCPenney compilation That Christmas Feeling.

Does anyone know what the deal is with these versions? Were they both from 1963, or did one come later? Whatever info can be added to the article, please add it. —mjb (talk) 09:18, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Ghost stories

At one time, I believe, it was custom in England to tell ghost stories on New Year Eve. However, I don't know that it was in the US at any point, especially by the time this song was written. Does anyone know any more about this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.21.84.39 (talk) 00:52, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

The article on [Yule] has links to the article on [Korochon], and it is easy to see that the Winter solstice would be a better calendrical candidate for a night of ghost stories than October 31st. This newspaper article [Desert News, Dec 23, 2010] discusses this anthology of christmas ghost stories published in 1893

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1993/pg1993.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by Krautsk (talk • contribs) 13:44, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Multiple Yearly Tables in Weekly Charts Section Still Necessary?

The Weekly Charts section of the article has become large and somewhat unwieldy. Is it really necessary at this point to continue displaying separate tables of chart peaks for individual years? Or would it make sense by now to consolidate the data into a single table that lists overall chart peaks? Sliv812 (talk) 02:07, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Since I'm the editor whose been breaking down the statistics by year, I should explain my reasoning for doing so. I want to use a different Christmas song as an example, though, to make it clear that it’s not this particular song that I’m especially fanatical about and also to argue that the current popularity in Christmas songs should be more thoroughly chronicled.

The song I want to discuss as an example of a page that should have year-by-year breakdowns of chart statistics is "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey. I have never voluntarily listened to this song or heard this song or any Carey song from start to finish. I have no regard for the song itself whatsoever, but its chart performance is a phenomenon that is not well-represented in its article. All of the years of chart statistics are thrown under a date range of 1994 to 2020. Someone just wanting to look at the statistics table and not actually read the article may assume that the song’s biggest popularity came upon its initial release, as is common with most songs. Having a table for every year the song charted would give a better sense of how the song really took off once radio stations started moving to all-Christmas formats every December in the 2000s.

If we were to use the single table format that that page uses for this song, the date range would read 1963 to 2020, a span of 57 years, in which the statistics are lumped together. There would be no sense of how there were no commercial physical singles released for the song in the US that would have provided the opportunity for the song to make the Hot 100 earlier than its first appearance in 2016. Even the date range of 2011 to 2020 doesn’t provide a sense of how the popularity of the song has grown over the past decade.

I think the documenting of the current popularity of Christmas music is providing a picture of how our culture is getting more and more dependent on using these songs and, it could be argued, even Christmas itself as a sort of an annual mood lift to forget about how bad things may seem to be. Billboard charted Christmas songs from 1963 to 1972 and then stopped as their popularity waned, so its certainly possible that this current craze will come to an end. I think that Wikipedia should detail how well the songs do by year simply for the sake of providing some context as to the exact peak or peaks of the song’s popularity. Danaphile (talk) 16:33, 15 December 2020 (UTC)