Brenda Lee’s holiday hit still rockin’

With Halloween in the rearview mirror, Mariah Carey is waiting in the wings somewhere, ready to kick off Christmas season once again.

Nov. 1 has become the official start of the holiday season, the day we put away everything orange and black and bring out everything red and green. And it starts the two-month run in which Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” is inescapable wherever you go.

The four-minute, one-second burst of joy will be blasted from cars, bars, dentist’s offices and your own Spotify, anywhere music is played. ‘Tis the season for Mariah and her soon-to-be yet again No. 1 hit.

“All I Want for Christmas is You,” released in 1994, first hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in 2019, 25 years after its release, and it has ascended to the top of the chart each year since. It was already No. 1 for two weeks in the beginning of 2022, part of last year’s holiday hangover, and there’s no reason to think it won’t return to the top again this holiday season.

But in recent years there’s been someone knocking on Ms. Carey’s door, and it’s time she’s allowed in and showed some holiday love. This year, it’s time Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” goes to No. 1.

Brenda Lee’s holiday hit has been rockin’ around that festive spruce since well before Mariah Carey was born. (Mariah doesn’t have an age, so we can only speculate on when that might have been.) It was recorded and first released in 1958 and it reached No. 14 on the Hot 100 in 1960, as Lee’s star exploded on the national stage.

But it never went away, and it has experienced a resurgence in recent years, especially after Billboard updated its formula and allowed streaming to impact its charts. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” hit the Top 10 in 2018 — 60 years after its release — and peaked at No. 9, and then reached No. 2 each of the last three years, blocked from the top spot by, you guessed it, “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

Is this the year Lee climbs to No. 1?

Lee, the Atlanta-born country, pop and rockabilly singer, recorded “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” when she was just 13 years old. She was already a seasoned entertainer by then, having performed in talent shows and on TV competitions since she was 5. She had a record deal by the time she was 11, and the big voice coming from her small 4-foot-9 frame earned her the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite.”

Lee was one of the top-selling female singers of the 1960s, racking up dozens of hits and selling more than 100 million albums. She hit No. 1 twice in 1960, first with the ballad “I’m Sorry,” which lead the tally for three weeks, and later with “I Want to Be Wanted,” which spent one week atop the chart.

She cranked out 10 albums between 1959 and 1964, her most commercially successful stretch, and continued to record albums through the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Her last studio album came in 1997, and she recorded a duets project featuring singers such as Dolly Parton, George Jones, Vince Gill and Emmylou Harris in 2007. More recently, her “uh-huh, honey” sample (from 1959’s “Sweet Nothin’s”) was used on Kanye West’s “Bound 2.”

All the while, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” has been the gift that keeps on giving. “It’s a rollicking, happy kind of song,” Lee said in 1982, when “Rockin’” was already ensconced in the Christmas canon. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of Christmas songs. It’s up-tempo and perky.”

It had already sold more than 7 million copies by the time it showed up in the 1990 smash “Home Alone,” soundtracking the scene where Kevin McCallister fakes an indoor party with a group of mannequins and a Michael Jordan cutout. “Rockin’” has since been covered by Miley Cyrus (as Hannah Montana), Kacey Musgraves (featuring Camila Cabello), Justin Bieber, Kelly Clarkson, Chris Isaak, Toby Keith, LeAnn Rimes, She & Him, Meghan Trainor, Alabama, Jessie J, the cast of “Glee” and more.

“Rockin’ “ was penned by Johnny Marks, the songwriter genius who also wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Run Rudolph Run,” and it was produced by Owen Bradley, who worked with Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline and more.

It runs just over two minutes in length, but gives you everything you want from the holiday season in its first few seconds alone: a soothing chorus of “ahhs” as warm as a crackling fire (those are the Anita Kerr Singers), and licks of rockabilly guitar dancing like snowflakes outside your window. Later, a sax solo (courtesy of Boots Randolph, who’d go on to record “Yakety Sax”) takes up nearly a quarter of the track’s runtime.

But it’s the overall mood of the song that makes it a perennial favorite. It feels like nostalgia, like home, like the good old days. The reality of the holidays is much different: stress, shopping, visitors, travel. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” is how we want the holidays to feel, and that’s what makes it so special.

Streams, Christmas radio spins and goodwill alone won’t get it to No. 1. It needs a targeted campaign, a hashtag (submitting #streamBrendaLee for consideration) and a social media outpouring to topple the behemoth that is “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and Team Brenda isn’t out there pounding the pavement. Mariah is, and on social media she’s been teasing the onset of Mariah Season for almost a month. This past week, she announced her series of upcoming holiday concerts. She’s not slowing down.