Every year, somewhere around the first of November, Mariah Carey posts a video. She emerges from a snow globe, or steps out of a sleigh, or simply fixes the camera with a look that says she has been waiting patiently, and she delivers two words: “It’s time.” And just like that, fifty million people decide that yes, it is. The decorations can go up. The season has officially been declared open — by its queen.

There is no serious argument to be had here. Mariah Carey is the Queen of Christmas and has been since 1994, when she recorded “All I Want for Christmas Is You” in a single summer session and, without quite meaning to, created the most successful holiday song in the history of recorded music. The song has been certified Diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America — the only Christmas song ever to receive that distinction — and has topped Billboard’s holiday chart for 57 of the 62 weeks it has ever been tracked. It earns her an estimated two to three million dollars every single December without her having to do anything except exist. The crown is hers. It is not going anywhere.

But here is the thing about Christmas music that makes it so endlessly fascinating: it is one of the very few corners of the music world big enough to hold multiple queens. Not pretenders to the throne, not runners-up — queens, each sovereign in their own right, each having built something so personal, so lasting, so genuinely beloved that the holiday season would feel noticeably different without them. And when you start pulling at the threads of how these women came to own a piece of Christmas, what you find every single time is the same thing underneath: a real story. Something that actually happened. A moment someone decided to chase down and turn into music.

Take Brenda Lee, whose claim to the crown goes all the way back to a Nashville recording studio in the summer of 1958. Lee was thirteen years old — thirteen — when she walked in and recorded “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” a rockabilly-inflected holiday song written by Johnny Marks, the same songwriter behind “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” It was the middle of summer, which producer Owen Bradley addressed practically and charmingly: he decorated the entire studio with a Christmas tree and had several of the band members dress in Santa suits to help set the mood. “It was a lot of fun,” Lee later recalled. “The warmth of the studio, the laughter, the magic — it all just took hold that day.” Then she walked back out into the summer heat, and the song sat largely unnoticed for years.

What happened next is one of the great slow-burn stories in popular music. As Lee’s career exploded in the early 1960s, people went back and found the song she had made as a teenager. It grew, and kept growing. It found a whole new generation in 1990 when it appeared in the beloved Christmas film Home Alone. The streaming era was extraordinarily kind to it. And then, in December 2023 — sixty-five years after that summer session in Nashville — “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” finally reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the very first time. Brenda Lee, then 78 years old, became the oldest artist ever to top that chart with it. A song recorded by a child in a tinsel-decorated studio while the band wore Santa hats, and it outlasted almost everything else from its entire era. If longevity is any part of what makes a queen, Brenda Lee has a case that is very difficult to argue with.

The idea of Christmas rooted in a real childhood place surfaces again, in a very different way, with Taylor Swift. Before the world knew her name, Swift grew up on an actual Christmas tree farm in Reading, Pennsylvania — an eleven-acre property her father purchased and ran alongside his finance career. She has described it as “such a weird place to grow up,” but also the thing that gave her what she called “this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then the holiday season.” In 2019, she finally channelled it into a song, writing “Christmas Tree Farm” on December 1st, recording it in a London studio on the 2nd and 3rd, and releasing it on the 6th. The music video is filled with real Swift family home footage — a small girl in snowsuits playing in the Pennsylvania winter, unwrapping her first guitar on Christmas morning. It is a song that only she could have made because the raw material was stored away from childhood, waiting patiently for the right moment. Swift may not have a full Christmas album to her name, but she has something arguably more powerful: a song that feels as though it grew from the ground.

Dolly Parton, meanwhile, has been tending her corner of the Christmas musical landscape since before most of today’s major artists had taken their first steps. Her relationship with the season is not a professional calculation but something that runs straight through the core of who she is — back to a large family in rural Tennessee, to Christmases with very little money and an enormous amount of love. She began making Christmas music in 1984, with the collaborative album Once Upon a Christmas recorded alongside Kenny Rogers — a project certified double platinum and accompanied by a CBS television special — and has never really stopped. She has three Christmas albums, multiple Christmas films and television specials, and returns to festive music the way other artists return to a favourite coat. Her most famous Christmas-associated song, “Hard Candy Christmas,” was actually written by Carol Hall for the 1982 film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, but it has become so identified with Parton that even she has had to remind people it is not hers. It is, she has pointed out with affectionate amusement, not really a Christmas song at all — the hard candy of the title refers to the inexpensive sweets that families who couldn’t afford proper gifts would give their children. It is a song about resilience. The fact that it lands like a Christmas classic says something profound about what the season actually means to people.

Dolly has been asked directly, on more than one occasion, whether she considers herself the Queen of Christmas. Her answer is completely in character. “Now, don’t you say that!” she replied in 2022. “I’m not going to compete with Mariah. I love her. You think of Christmas, you think of Mariah. I’m happy to be second in line to her.” When Mariah heard this, she tweeted back immediately: “The Queen of Everything! The Queen of the World, The Queen of Christmas, The Queen of Mine!!” The two most serious contenders for the crown, publicly and warmly insisting the other deserves it more. Only in Christmas music.

In 2013, two women released their debut Christmas albums within weeks of each other and produced songs that, more than a decade later, are still growing in reach every single year. The first was Kelly Clarkson — the original American Idol winner, already a decade into a formidable pop career — who had been longing to make a Christmas record for years. “I’ve been dying to make a Christmas album,” she told Billboard. “What’s cool about making the Christmas album was, ‘Oh, there are no limitations! We can do whatever we want!'” The resulting record, Wrapped in Red, is exactly that free — a joyful, expansive pop Christmas album produced by Greg Kurstin that moves easily from big-voiced ballads to country-tinged originals to classic cover versions. Its standout track, “Underneath the Tree,” is a song built around sleigh bells that actually swing, a full-throated vocal performance, and a lyric about the best possible Christmas gift: the person standing next to you. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers named it the top new classic holiday song of 2021 — eight years after it was released. By December 2024, it had finally broken the UK Top 10 for the first time, eleven years on from when it was recorded. It has accumulated around half a billion streams on Spotify. It is, by almost any measure, the closest thing the 21st century has produced to a true Christmas standard.

The second was Leona Lewis, who had won The X Factor in 2006 and gone on to international success before she quietly stepped into the festive arena with her album Christmas, with Love and its lead single “One More Sleep.” The song is Motown-warm and immediately familiar, built around the simple, aching pleasure of counting down the days until a loved one comes home for Christmas. Lewis has spoken about recording it in the British summer and diving deep into classic festive recordings to find her way into the right emotional space — discovering music she might never otherwise have found. The song that came out of that process has a timelessness to it that is genuinely hard to manufacture, because it was not manufactured at all. It has since been confirmed as the most-streamed British Christmas song of the 21st century, with 190 million UK streams and counting. Two women, two debut Christmas records in the same year, and two songs that have spent the decade since simply refusing to stop. The Christmas music world is extraordinarily good at rewarding patience.

Ariana Grande’s entry into the festive canon operated on a very different timeline. She had already released a Christmas EP in 2013, but it was her 2015 follow-up, Christmas & Chill, that genuinely announced her as a force in the genre — and she did it in characteristically Ariana fashion, which is to say completely on her own terms. The entire EP was written and recorded in a single week. “Twas a long, productive slumber party,” she wrote on social media upon its release. What emerged was something the Christmas playlist had never quite heard before: trap hi-hats and cloudy 808s under holiday sleigh bells, a moodier and more contemporary festive atmosphere that felt genuinely fresh rather than retro-nostalgic. It was the sound of Christmas music remembering it was allowed to be modern. Grande has since called it her favourite body of work, and critics who revisited it later described it as “a catalyst of original Christmas carols for the so-called doomed millennial generation.” That is quite a legacy for something written in a week.

Kylie Minogue’s route to Christmas royalty is a story that takes a full decade to tell properly. Her 2015 album Kylie Christmas arrived with the same glittering pop confidence she has brought to everything across nearly four decades of music and found an immediate home in people’s festive lives, particularly in the UK and Australia where Kylie occupies a place in the cultural furniture that is almost impossible to overstate. She has reflected that the album “remains in people’s homes and hearts, and it rolls around every year.” Then came the tenth anniversary edition in 2025, and with it a song she had been carrying around in her head since the summer that the first album was finished. Sitting on a terrace in Berlin with a glass of wine, she and a collaborator had come up with the idea of a song called “XMAS,” structured like “YMCA.” “I’ve been sitting on the chorus for 10 years,” she said. A decade is a very long time to remain faithful to a chorus. The fact that she held onto it, finished it, and released it as part of Kylie Christmas (Fully Wrapped) says something rather beautiful about her relationship with the season — and about the instinct that told her it was worth keeping.

Gwen Stefani’s Christmas credentials have perhaps the most unexpectedly wonderful origin story of all. In 2017, she was at Blake Shelton’s ranch in Oklahoma — surrounded by, as she described it, “exotic animals, like wildebeests — it’s like Jurassic Park” — when she decided to go for a run. Mid-run, with the Oklahoma landscape around her and the wildebeests presumably looking on with interest, a Christmas chorus came out of her mouth. “I was just singing out loud, by myself — with the wildebeests!” That improvised chorus became the seed of You Make It Feel Like Christmas, her debut holiday album featuring six original songs and six classic covers. The title track became a duet with Shelton, who has characteristically and charmingly understated his contribution: “I sent Gwen a couple of lines of the song. She took it and made the song what it is.” Stefani herself has been clearer about what drove the whole project. “Christmas music lives forever,” she has said. “The idea of getting to be a part of people’s holidays through music is one of the greatest gifts.” She performed the song at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting in both 2022 and 2025. A run with the wildebeests led to that stage. There are worse origin stories.

And then there is Meghan Trainor, whose debut Christmas album A Very Trainor Christmas arrived in October 2020 — a moment when the world, in the middle of its first pandemic year, was quietly desperate for exactly the kind of unguarded, all-in festive joy that only Trainor can deliver. “Back in March when we were all sent inside,” she explained, “I realised the world would need some extra cheer this holiday season.” She went to work immediately, recording a project that was as personal as it was celebratory: her father Gary appears as a featured artist, her brothers Ryan and Justin co-wrote the songs, her cousins sing on it, and the whole record sounds like a Trainor family Christmas that accidentally became a pop album. Earth, Wind & Fire came on board for the exuberant “Holidays,” because of course they did — Trainor described them as her family’s “interminable preference.” Seth MacFarlane joined for a duet on “White Christmas.” She filmed music videos and fifteen live performances while five months pregnant. The result is 54 minutes of the most committed, most genuinely warm Christmas music released in years — and one of the most underrated holiday albums of the last decade.

So who, at the end of all of this, actually wears the crown?

Mariah Carey, still and always. Nothing in this conversation changes that.

But what these women collectively demonstrate is that Christmas music has always been large enough for many queens — each sovereign over something distinct and irreplaceable. Brenda Lee owns longevity that crosses generations and six decades. Dolly Parton owns the roots, the warmth, and the kind of deep human authenticity that never goes out of fashion. Taylor Swift owns the childhood memory so vivid it became a song. Kelly Clarkson owns the modern standard that keeps finding new listeners every year. Leona Lewis owns the British heart of the season. Ariana Grande owns the reinvention. Kylie owns the shimmer and a chorus she guarded faithfully for ten years. Gwen Stefani owns the love story. Meghan Trainor owns the family reunion.

The Christmas music world is, in the best possible way, gloriously overcrowded with royalty. Long may they all reign.