What Is the Most Popular Christmas Song?

On December 25, 1941, mellow-voiced singer and actor Bing Crosby first crooned what would become a perennial holiday classic. The song, a wistful ballad called “White Christmas,” was written by Irving Berlin. Crosby performed it on his weekly radio show, and a few months later he recorded it for Holiday Inn, a Christmas movie that paired the crooner with dancer Fred Astaire. The film premiered in the summer of 1942—well ahead of the holiday rush. By December the song had sold a million copies.

“White Christmas” went on to become the top-selling single of all time. According to Guinness World Records, by 2012 it had sold some 50 million copies worldwide. It won the Academy Award for best original song in 1943, and two years later it appeared on Crosby’s holiday-themed album Merry Christmas. Hollywood even cashed in on its enduring appeal by making a film called White Christmas (1954), which starred Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and Vera-Ellen. In his autobiography, Call Me Lucky (1953), Crosby suggested he couldn’t get away from the song if he tried. “It’s a great song with a simple melody,” he wrote, “and nowadays anywhere I go I have to sing it.”

Indeed, Crosby remained identified with the tune—and with Christmas—for the rest of his life. Shortly before he died in October 1977, he taped the television special Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas. One of the show’s highlights is an appearance by young glam rocker David Bowie, who joins Crosby on a duet of “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy.” Moments before the two music legends begin singing, however, they sneak in a reference to “White Christmas.”

Crosby’s (and Berlin’s) classic may be the most popular Christmas song saleswise, but “Silent Night” has the honor of being the most recorded Christmas song of all time—at least in the United States. In 2014 Time magazine examined U.S. copyright registration data and determined that the German carol had been recorded more than 700 times since 1978. (“Joy to the World” was a distant runner-up, with just under 400 recordings.) The song’s lyrics were written as a poem by Joseph Mohr in 1816, with a melody Franz Gruber added two years later. Its many modern interpreters have included Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Mahalia Jackson, Julie Andrews, Boyz II Men, Sinéad O’Connor, Kirk Franklin and the Family, and Justin Bieber.

In the age of audio streaming (i.e., the 21st century), a song’s popularity is more often measured by how many times it has been streamed on a service such as Spotify. With more than 2.3 billion global streams as of 2025, the most popular Christmas song in the digital era is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” an upbeat favorite that first appeared on the pop superstar’s 1994 holiday album, Merry Christmas. Because Carey did not initially release it as a commercial single, it was several years before the song would show up on the Billboard Hot 100 (until 1998, airplay-only singles did not qualify for Billboard chart tracking). It first charted during the holiday season in 2000, which eventually became a routine for the song, year after year. In 2017 it entered the top 10, and it reached number one in December 2019.

The belated success of Carey’s song mirrors that of “Last Christmas,” an annual chart fixture by the British pop duo Wham! that was released in 1984. As of 2025 the song has garnered some 2 billion streams on Spotify. Wham!’s lead singer and songwriter George Michael wrote “Last Christmas” with the hope that it would become the band’s fourth chart-topper that year. (Unusual for a holiday tune—but not for the songwriter who gave the world the sultry ballad “Careless Whisper”—“Last Christmas” is about heartbreak and unrequited love, not festive cheer.) It made it to the second position on the U.K. pop chart, but it was famously denied the top spot by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” Band Aid’s all-star charity single. (Michael sang on the Band Aid single. And like that song, all the proceeds for “Last Christmas” were donated to famine relief in Ethiopia.) In January 2021 “Last Christmas” went to number one in Britain—36 years and one month after its debut.