Christmas pop
Also known as Christmas pop music, holiday pop
A useful umbrella term for holiday songs that sit squarely inside pop’s melodic, glossy mainstream. The label is broad, but it fits the way many Christmas records move between seasonal tradition and chart-minded pop craft.
Origins and context
The style grew out of American popular song and recording culture, where holiday standards and mainstream pop production increasingly overlapped in the mid-20th century.
History
Christmas pop does not have a single clean origin point so much as a long overlap between holiday repertoire and mainstream pop recording. By the 1940s and 1950s, artists like Bing Crosby had made holiday songs into mass-market hits, and later pop singers kept reshaping the season into something tailored for the radio and the charts. Official Charts’ history of Christmas Number 1s shows how deeply festive singles have been woven into pop history, from classic crooners to later pop acts such as Brenda Lee and Mariah Carey.
Notable artists
- BCBing Crosby
- BLBrenda Lee
- MCMariah Carey
Essential listening
- 1
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Explore connected genres
Sources and further reading
- Christmas
- officialcharts.com
Official Charts frames Christmas Number 1s as part of pop history and notes the range of genres that appear in the festive chart tradition.
- Apple Music
Bing Crosby’s Apple Music artist page identifies him as a pop artist and ties him closely to White Christmas.
- Apple Music
Brenda Lee’s Apple Music artist page identifies her as a pop artist and highlights Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.
- Apple Music
Mariah Carey’s Apple Music artist page highlights All I Want for Christmas Is You as her ultimate holiday pop song.
- Every Official Christmas Number 1 ever!