The song was never really about Christmas at all. That may be why it never left.

In February 1984, George Michael disappeared upstairs during a lazy Sunday visit to his parents’ house, leaving bandmate Andrew Ridgeley on the sofa with the football on television. He came back down about an hour later and told Ridgeley he had to come hear something. What Michael played him — worked out largely on a small four-track cassette recorder in his childhood bedroom — was, in Ridgeley’s words, a moment of wonder. It would become “Last Christmas.”

Michael had set the song for himself almost as a dare. By 1983 he’d decided he wanted to prove, definitively, that he could write a Christmas number one — a genuine standard, not a novelty. Wham! recorded it that August at Advision Studios in London, where Michael, characteristically particular, had the room decorated for the season to get himself in the mood despite it being high summer. He produced every part himself, played the synthesizer with two or three fingers by his own account, and worked with barely anyone else in the building besides his engineer and a couple of assistants.

There’s a small irony sitting at the center of the song that most people singing along have never quite registered: “Last Christmas” isn’t really about Christmas. There’s no snow, no Santa, no tree. It’s a breakup song that happens to be timed to the holiday — a story of giving someone your heart on December 25th and having it handed back the following day. The melody is warm and bright enough that the sadness underneath barely registers on a first listen, which might be exactly why it works as well as it does; it lets you feel nostalgic and a little wistful without quite admitting why.

The song was released in December 1984 with every reasonable expectation of hitting number one in the UK — until Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” arrived, a charity single Michael himself sang on, and knocked “Last Christmas” to a permanent runner-up spot that lasted, remarkably, for thirty-six years. It became the best-selling UK single never to top the chart, a strange kind of record in itself. Then, in the years following Michael’s death on Christmas Day 2016, something shifted: streaming numbers surged every December, fans campaigned, and on New Year’s Day 2021, “Last Christmas” finally, formally, reached number one.

Andrew Ridgeley has said Michael would have been beside himself. It’s hard not to hear something bittersweet in that — a song written to outlast the moment it describes, that took nearly four decades to fully arrive, delivered to an audience that no longer had the person who wrote it there to see it happen. Every December, somehow, both things are true at once: the song is still about heartbreak, and it still sounds like joy.