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This week marked a major milestone on the Billboard charts: Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” topped the Hot 100 for the first time in the song’s history, 65 years after its release. In its long, slow ascent to the top, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has broken several records: its six-decade journey is the longest trip to No. 1 for any song in history, and the climb makes Lee, at 78, the oldest artist to ever have a Hot 100 chart-topper. That she would finally break through in 2023 isn’t an accident: Lee has been pushing her beloved tune hard through her newly created TikTok account, and in November, a video of her discussing the genesis of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” with fellow legends Tanya Tucker and Trisha Yearwood racked up 1.1 million views. Lee wanted this, and Christmas music fans clearly wanted her to have it.
Lee’s long, long overdue achievement, however, would appear to be the loss of one Mariah Carey, whose inevitable-as-death-and-taxes “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has now been usurped from the Hot 100 summit by another Christmas song for the first time since it reached the top in December 2019. Much like “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” it took some patience before Carey’s 1994 single hit No. 1—25 years, only second to Lee in terms of sleeper chart-toppers.
But Carey needn’t sweat Lee’s (much-deserved) success. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is very likely to become the biggest song in music history, but to get there, it’ll take the one thing Carey is loath to acknowledge: time.