About “Last Christmas” and Christmas 2024

I suppose it could have happened in the U.S. But it was listening to the UK’s Magic Radio on Christmas morning that I heard Sonall Shah say it. Much of the 11 a.m. hour was devoted to two things: listener shout outs to whoever was doing the cooking in the household and more highlights from a week-long interview with James Corden and Ruth Jones about the final episode of Gavin & Stacey airing that night. But Shah did tease that “this year’s No. 1 Christmas song is on the way for you.”

That was Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” which, after famously losing the 1984 Christmas No. 1 battle to Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was the Christmas No. 1 this year for the second year in a row. It now has nine weeks at No. 1 in the UK, although George Michael did not live to see them.

In the U.S., “Last Christmas” never charted at all in 1984. Columbia worked “Do They Know It’s Christmas” to Top 40 radio, but since “Careless Whisper” had just charted, and “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was only a few months old in America anyway, it did not promote “Last Christmas” to radio. The only evidence I can find of a PD reporting “Last Christmas” is Tony Waitekus at WCIL Carbondale, Ill., and that was two years later.

On Billboard’s Hot 100, “Last Christmas” has only gotten to No. 3 in recent years, behind the juggernaut of Mariah Carey and Brenda Lee. At AC radio, however, it pulled into Mediabase’s No. 1 most-played gold title for the last week of the holiday season, displacing “Feliz Navidad” by Jose Feliciano. (That song, with no significant other versions, has an advantage over “Last Christmas,” where airplay could also be split by Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, the Backstreet Boys, the Glee cast, and Jimmy Eat World.)

Make no mistake, though. “Last Christmas” was one of the inescapable records of Christmas 1984. My road trip that year was from Washington, D.C. to the Berkshires, and all three Wham! songs were unavoidable. Living in L.A. at the time, Wham were already a known entity that had been played on KIIS and even KROQ. In the rest of America, there was the excitement of three career singles within weeks of each other.

A few other thoughts about “Last Christmas” from 2025’s vantage point:

It’s interesting to be hearing it just a few weeks after the “yacht rock” documentary. The official keepers of the genre have never issued a “Yacht or Nyacht” ruling, but if the bounciness of “What a Fool Believes” is a key measurement in whether a song is “Yacht Rock,” “Last Christmas” certainly has that. There’s no ‘70s rock or session player connection, another of their factors, but Wham! did make inroads at Urban radio far beyond any Doobie Brothers single, going to No. 8. 

It probably couldn’t happen now. In 1984, Top 40 was the arbiter of new Christmas music. It didn’t contribute a major new song every year, but having two new Christmas songs explode on to contemporary radio was a big deal. With AC having assumed that role, only a few new songs (mostly covers) are given even a handful of spins every year. After a decade, streaming has made Kelly Clarkson’s “Underneath the Tree” and Ariana Grande’s “Santa, Tell Me” into top 10 songs in Billboard but only No. 84 and No. 211 respectively at AC.

Top 40 was also in the peak year musically of its mid-‘80s resurgence with the power to anoint a holiday song immediately. It was a different story in 1994 when Mariah Carey was one of the few superstars Top 40 had, and the format didn’t even exist in many markets. That’s why CHR was so grateful to have “All I Want for Christmas (Is You)” at the time. When the format rebounded, it became a song of greater potency with each year.

Or maybe it would happen now, but differently. “Careless Whisper” was a fast-breaking hit during a time of year that is effectively closed off to new music now. In the streaming era, where singles come from albums less sequentially—no more “Wake Me Up” in fall, “Whisper” in winter, “Everything She Wants” in Spring, “Freedom” in summer—the first two Wham! hits would have happened in even shorter order. Perhaps “Last Christmas” would happen now because of streaming and, unlike 1984, not off the chart radar. Who knows if “Everything” and “Freedom” would have been singles at all?

Artist excitement means a lot, and we have less. Since the ‘70s, a lot of new Christmas music has come from artists either in an imperial period (Elton John, Carey, Clarkson, Ed Sheeran) or bursting into it (Wham! Grande). Between “Nonsense Christmas” and her Lindsey Stirling duet on “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” Sabrina Carpenter didn’t really have any impetus to force a new holiday song in between two other chart climbers from “Taste,” but imagine if she did.

We’re going to have questions about Christmas music for the next month. It could certainly be the timing of December Nielsen PPM ratings measurement, which included a few less days than last year, but many stations were off by a few shares from last year. (It must now immediately note that those stations were still up sharply from November and a lot of stations would love to have only a 9-share.)

Detractors have been expecting the all-holiday format to lose some of its potency in the streaming era for years. We’ll know more in a few weeks when the special Holiday ’23 ratings come out. Again, any discussion is almost certainly going to be about an 18-share vs. a 14-share. But there were a few prominent AC and Classic Hits stations that decided not to switch format this year, and a market (Miami/Ft. Lauderdale) where no station went all-Christmas.

There’s no question that the 40-year-old “Last Christmas” has relevance at holiday time, and so do the even older songs that join it in the top 10 from “The Christmas Song” to “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” When streamers want “Jingle Bell Rock,” they choose Bobby Helms over Daryl Hall & John Oates. 

Still, recent years have seen many stations refreshing their holiday playlists only by going back to long-ago holiday albums by pre-rock crooners, ‘60s MOR acts, or even Percy Faith and Ray Conniff. Many holiday stations added nothing new to the library this year. In the early days of the holiday radio takeover, a few stations tried a more contemporary Christmas, and the results were decisively against them. But it’s a generation later, and I still wonder if radio is right, or just in retrograde. 

At this writing, the top 16 songs on the Hot 100 are holiday titles, none of them currents. Even though holiday music is not quite as big as last year, other contemporary formats, particularly Top 40, continue to suffer during the holidays, and having nothing new to play seems like a significant part of it. If there is an artist on a Sabrina-like hot streak next year, some thought should go in to creating a holiday song that can break through at Top 40, Hot AC, and AC. Otherwise, there’s a chance of the next Christmas classic starting as a streaming outlier.