Why Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” Is Awesome

Celebrate a song the haters have been getting wrong for 45 years

Ed note: Stewart Mason wrote this story for Three Imaginary Girls last year, and it completely changed how I feel about this song*—so I asked him if we could run it on genXy, and he graciously agreed. We’re going to be talking about Christmas songs we love and hate (or love to hate) tomorrow (Dec 13) on The Daily Whatever Show, and “Wonderful Christmastime” will most def be up for discussion. Come join us at noon ET/9am PT! - Dana DuBois

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“Wonderful Christmastime” 45 sleeve, 1979 (MPL Productions Ltd.)

I live in the kind of neighborhood where the most popular local business is a giant two-story indie bookstore. Last December, I was in there buying books and notebooks and colored pencils and other gifts for my wife and the few other people I shop for. (And myself. I mean, I’m in a bookstore, I’m gonna buy books.)

I hadn’t been paying attention to the holiday music they were playing as I shopped, because it was the same things every other store plays from the day after Thanksgiving on. Let’s assume it was Mariah. When that faded out, a vintage synthesizer pinged out single notes that landed like raindrops until they coalesced into a sprightly little melody underpinned by sleigh bells. And then one of my favorite voices in the history of pop music cheerfully sang “The mood is right…”

And then the song stopped dead. Like, there should have been the sound of a needle being ripped across the vinyl. And three long seconds later, Stevie Wonder’s 1967 single “What Christmas Means To Me” started playing. “Well, thank god for that,” someone muttered a few feet away from me in the Art, Design, and Photography section. For a brief moment, I wanted to show him the true meaning of Christmas via a dope slap up the back of his knitted cap.

Because Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” is one of the all-time great holiday songs, and I truly feel that not only do its haters miss its point, but that the Christmas season isn’t really complete without hearing it.

The song

For all its holiday cheer, Paul McCartney wasn’t in a particularly festive mood when he started recording “Wonderful Christmastime.” In fact, it was the middle of July 1979, and he was alone in his self-built DIY studio at High Park, his farm near Campbeltown, Scotland. He had been stung by poor reviews of the latest Wings album, Back To The Egg, and decided to get stuck into another project right away. Influenced by Tubeway Army’s synth-driven post-punk hit “Are Friends Electric?,” he pulled out and set up all of the various synthesizers he’d collected over the last few years and decided to write and record a few songs relying exclusively on them. (The results of these sessions came out in 1980 as the solo album McCartney II.)

The thing was, unusually for Scotland even in July, it was unbearably hot. Sweating in his un-air-conditioned studio in a former barn, he started giggling over the idea of recording a Christmas song in this decidedly non-wintry weather. Because this was Paul McCartney in 1979, there is every chance he was stoned off his tits at the time, but honestly, the idea was sound. Pop Christmas singles, recorded by everyone from Elton John through cross-generational duet partners David Bowie and Bing Crosby to his ex-bandmate John Lennon, were entirely common in that decade. (Always the iconoclast, George Harrison had recorded a celebratory single for New Year’s Day, 1974’s “Ding Dong, Ding Dong.” It’s not great.)

Building the track from a bed of sleigh bells and a bass synth track that I have previously described in print as “sounding like a giant robot farting underwater,” McCartney threw on every seasonal element he could think of before turning his mind to the lyrics. He later told an interviewer, “To me, Christmas is mainly all the parties, and the good humor everyone gets into suddenly for those few days a year. So the song’s basically about ‘The mood is right, the spirit’s up, we’re here tonight, and that’s enough.’ It’s very simple.”

McCartney came about that view of the holidays honestly: according to Mark Lewisohn’s fascinatingly exhaustive multi-volume Beatles biography, even after the Beatles were signed to Parlophone Records and had a single out, McCartney returned to his family home in Liverpool to be a bartender at the extended McCartney clan’s annual holiday bash. In addition to the joys of seeing, chatting with, and having a knees-up at the family piano with his beloved relatives, he’d also regularly make up to 20 pounds in tips while behind the bar, which in today’s dollars is close to five hundred bucks.

The initial reaction

Unfortunately, by that point, McCartney had long since become a favorite target of Britain’s generally obnoxious pop press, and “Wonderful Christmastime” got even worse reviews than Back To The Egg had, roundly slagged off as a cutesy novelty of little substance. Although it did okay on the British charts, peaking at no. 6 just after Christmas, it missed America’s Billboard chart entirely, reportedly endangering the job of Columbia Records president Walter Yetnikoff, who had spent millions to sign McCartney when his American deal with Capitol Records had ended the year before only to see his first album for the label and then his holiday single stiff.

I can believe that “Wonderful Christmastime” didn’t chart in the states until 1979, because honestly, I don’t think I heard the song until maybe Christmas 1981. (Christmas 1980, only weeks after the murder of John Lennon, radio programmers probably thought it was not in keeping with the mood of the season.) And for that first couple of years, I only heard it once or twice a year on the radio. It wasn’t until my first Christmas with MTV, in December 1983, that I found out a video had been produced for the song, with Paul and the final Wings lineup (Linda McCartney on keyboards and vocals, Denny Laine and Laurence Juber on guitars and Steve Holley on drums) performing the song as they stroll around a pub and a huge outdoor bonfire while computer animations that now look incredibly dated swirl around them.

Through the rest of the mid-’80s, I heard the song more regularly during the holidays, and the (mostly good-humored) snark toward the song increased as well. A lot of my friends in high school, who knew me primarily as the kid whose primary musical obsessions were with college radio and the import bins at the weird-smelling record stores near the Texas Tech campus were confused by my love of the song, not realizing how important The Beatles and McCartney’s Wings albums had been to my preteen musical development.

Why I love this song

Or, for that matter, with how important the song’s subject matter, as explained by McCartney in that quote and shown off in the playfully simple lyrics, has always been to me. As a lifelong agnostic, Christmas has never been religiously important to me or my family. Thanksgiving, a holiday without religious or nationalistic overtones, has always been the more personally important holiday for me. But like McCartney, I think of Christmas as a time of celebration and warmth — revelry, as it was called in medieval and renaissance times. A period of fun, food, fellowship (and often a bit of rebellion against whoever happened to be in charge either politically or spiritually) that fortifies us before the long hard slog through the rest of winter.

I love “Wonderful Christmastime” for its unabashed and complete uncoolness. I love the way it takes post-punk synthesizers — instruments that I love and that generally I do associate with cool (sometimes even austere and forbidding) music and aesthetics — and unashamedly makes them sound goofily celebratory. I love that the lyrics call out children’s choirs, which I normally find cringe-inducing, as worthy of admiration. Even though I don’t drink, I love that it’s about toasting friends and family. I love “Wonderful Christmastime” because, again, the synth bass sounds like a giant robot farting underwater.

I love “Wonderful Christmastime” because it’s unapologetically fun. And not nearly enough in our lives is fun.

*The bridge still sucks, though.