A Danish engineer named Carl Weismann kept ruining his birdsong recordings with barking dogs in the background, so instead of throwing the tape out, he spliced the barks together by pitch until they lined up with real melodies. Four actual dogs — Dolly, Pearl, Caesar, and King — got credited as a “canine chorus” on Jingle Bells in 1955. The track flopped and sat forgotten for fifteen years, buried on the B-side of a novelty medley, until a New York radio host played it as a joke in 1970. RCA rushed out a re-release, and by 1972 four barking dogs had a number-one single on Billboard’s Christmas chart.
That chart is worth explaining, since it comes up more than once here. Because holiday songs cycle back every December instead of fading after release, Billboard eventually gave them a separate ranking from the regular Hot 100. That’s why a song can be “number one for Christmas” while barely registering on the pop charts most people actually follow — several songs on this list did exactly that.
Ten-year-old Gayla Peevey recorded I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas in 1953, a John Rox novelty tune that climbed to number 24 on the Billboard pop chart and landed her a spot on The Ed Sullivan Show. What happened next is the part people remember: her hometown paper and the Oklahoma City Zoo turned the song’s popularity into a real fundraiser, asking local kids to mail in their dimes and buy Gayla a hippo. A baby hippo named Mathilda arrived that Christmas and lived at the zoo for nearly fifty years. Peevey herself thought she’d never earned a dime from the song — until her daughter went digging decades later and found a forgotten royalty account with Sony holding close to six figures.
Eartha Kitt brought an entirely different energy to that same year. RCA commissioned Santa Baby for her in 1953, and Kitt turned a Christmas wish list into a masterclass in innuendo — sables, yachts, a ring “from Tiffany’s” — delivered with a purr instead of a smile. It was the best-selling Christmas single of 1953, banned by some Southern stations for being too suggestive, and briefly caused a stir after Kitt performed it for Greece’s visiting royal family. The song has kept generating friction ever since: in 2018, Miley Cyrus performed a rewritten version on television, explaining that the original’s implications made her uncomfortable, and swapped the wish list for a pointed line about men keeping their hands to themselves.
José Feliciano wrote Feliz Navidad in about ten minutes and recorded it in a single take in 1970, homesick that year for family back in Puerto Rico and New York. The entire lyric is nineteen words, repeated. The song didn’t even chart on the Billboard Hot 100 until 1998, almost three decades after it was written, and it took until 2020 — fifty years after that afternoon in the studio — to finally crack the top 10.
By the mid-1950s, Christmas music had room for outright comedy, too. Stan Freberg’s 1955 recording of Nuttin’ for Christmas — a song already climbing the charts that year in five other versions, including a million-selling take by six-year-old Barry Gordon — took the story of a badly behaved kid who gets nothing from Santa and gave it a twist ending: a burglar dressed as Santa, voiced by Daws Butler, comes down the chimney instead. It only reached number 53 on Billboard, well behind the more innocent versions, but it’s the one still remembered as a cult classic, and it set Freberg up for the sharper satire he’d bring to Christmas advertising a few years later.
Randy Brooks wrote Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer almost as a joke in 1977, after hearing a Merle Haggard song and wondering how a grandmother might actually meet her end at Christmas. Elmo & Patsy self-pressed 500 copies in 1979 — the smallest run a plant would even do — and more than a few radio stations refused to play it. By 1983, it was number one on Billboard’s Christmas chart, ahead of both “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bell Rock” that same year.
Chris Butler finished the lyrics to Christmas Wrapping in a cab, in the middle of a New York heat wave, after putting the assignment off as long as he possibly could. Singer Patty Donahue had to memorize nearly 500 rapid-fire words on short notice; you can actually hear her run out of air by the final verse. Butler didn’t know the song had taken off until his girlfriend called him on tour to tell him he was all over the radio.
Snoopy’s Christmas came out in 1967, but the story it tells reaches back to 1914 — the real Christmas truce, when British and German soldiers along the Western Front climbed out of their trenches to trade gifts and sing carols across no-man’s-land. The Royal Guardsmen’s version hit number one in Australia and New Zealand and stayed there for weeks, while never once touching the Billboard Hot 100 back home.
Thurl Ravenscroft sang You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch in 1966, and a production oversight left his name off the credits entirely — for years, people simply assumed narrator Boris Karloff had done the singing himself. Ravenscroft spent the following decades as the uncredited voice of Tony the Tiger, booming “They’re grrreat!” through Frosted Flakes commercials. The song outlasted the confusion: once Ravenscroft was finally credited properly, it cracked the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in 2020, more than half a century after it was recorded.
Ross Bagdasarian Sr. built The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late) out of nothing but a speed-shifting tape recorder and his own voice, sung slow and played back fast to create three high, squeaky characters. He named them Alvin, Simon, and Theodore after three real Liberty Records executives. The song sold over four million copies within weeks of its 1958 release and won three Grammys at the very first Grammy Awards ceremony. The trick outlived the record: decades later, hip-hop producers started sampling old soul records and speeding up the vocals the same way, a technique that picked up the nickname “chipmunk soul.”
And then there was Spike Jones, who turned Christmas chaos into an art form. His band, the City Slickers, built All I Want for Christmas (Is My Two Front Teeth) around a lisping falsetto vocal and the kind of gleeful racket — cowbells, gunshots, kazoos — his live shows were famous for. The song itself came from a schoolteacher named Donald Gardner, who noticed that most of his second-grade class was missing their front teeth and wrote the whole thing in about thirty minutes that same night. Jones’s 1948 recording sold nearly two million copies in eight weeks and hit number one the following year.