A song nobody noticed in 1963 became a yearly appointment nobody wanted to miss.

Phil Spector for his 1963 holiday compilation A Christmas Gift for You, the song had originally been intended for Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes. According to Darlene Love, Ronnie couldn’t quite find the ache the song needed. Love, who was already one of Spector’s most reliable session voices — she’d sung lead on hits credited to other groups entirely, without her name anywhere near the label — took the demo over the phone and made the song hers instead.

It didn’t do much of anything on release. The album came out the same week as the Kennedy assassination, in a country that had no appetite left that November for Christmas music of any kind, and the song sank without much notice. Love has spent decades since watching it become one of the most-covered Christmas songs in American music, recorded by everyone from U2 to Mariah Carey to Cher, while she got comparatively little credit for having originated it in the first place — a common story for singers working under Spector, whose name too often eclipsed the voices actually doing the work.

What changed the song’s fortunes wasn’t a rerelease or a resurgence. It was David Letterman. In 1986, Letterman caught Love performing the song live in a small revue and was, by his own account, instantly obsessed — he wanted her on his show that December, and then the next, and then every December after that, for twenty-eight years, across two networks and nearly thirty Christmases, until “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” became as fixed a part of American late-night television as the show itself. Letterman called her, without much exaggeration, his Christmas Queen. He has said the performance was his favorite part of the entire holiday.

There’s something instructive in watching decades of footage of Love doing the same song, night after night, year after year, and never once looking like she’s phoning it in. She sings it in 1986 with the same full-throated commitment she brings to it in 2013, standing in front of a full band and an audience that already knows every word, as though singing it were the whole point of the season rather than an obligation to get through. When Letterman retired in 2015, Love chose not to take the tradition to another late-night show out of loyalty to him — instead moving it to The View, then to duets with Cher, then, in 2023, back to a surprise reunion with Letterman himself on YouTube, both of them older, the song exactly the same.

It’s a strange kind of Christmas story: not one written about longing, exactly, though the lyric certainly is, but one made real by sheer repetition and refusal to let a good thing go stale. Love didn’t write “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” She just decided, for thirty years running, that it deserved to be sung like it mattered every single time.