--- title: The Most Popular Christmas Song Ever description: TIME crunches the merry numbers behind the most popular Christmas songs of the modern era canonical: https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/ author: Chris Wilson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-12-02T14:49:24.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:48:38.568Z og:title: This Is the Most Popular Christmas Song Ever og:description: TIME crunches the merry numbers behind the most popular Christmas songs of the modern era og:url: https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: This Is the Most Popular Christmas Song Ever twitter:description: TIME crunches the merry numbers behind the most popular Christmas songs of the modern era twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # This Is the Most Popular Christmas Song Ever > Sponsored content. 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It curates the day's top headlines with TIME's reporting and analysis across politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. It is free to join at time.com/newsletters. #### How do I sign up for The Brief? The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ## Video: See The Unique Way Amazon Ships This Teddy Bear [Watch (HLS stream): See The Unique Way Amazon Ships This Teddy Bear](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/IY8KG0y3.m3u8) (2:54)  _Published 2014-12-01. Go Behind the Scenes at Amazon to see how the products you buy make it to the shipping truck_  by [Chris Wilson](https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/)  ## Chris Wilson Dec 2, 2014 2:49 PM UTC  by [Chris Wilson](https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/)  ## Chris Wilson Dec 2, 2014 2:49 PM UTC The names Joseph Mohr and Franz Xaver Gruber have largely vanished into the annals of Christmas tormentors, but their greatest triumph lives on. “Silent Night,” which Mohr [wrote the lyrics for](http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/christmas/carols%5F1.shtml#section%5F2) (in German) in 1816 and Gruber put to music two years later, is the most recorded Christmas song in the modern era of the holiday’s substantial oeuvre. To determine this fact, TIME crawled the records at the U.S. Copyright Office, which offers [digitized registrations](http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=local&PAGE=First) going back to 1978, and collected data on every Christmas album recorded since that time. “Silent Night,” it turns out, is not merely the most popular carol; with 733 copyrighted recordings since 1978, it is nearly twice as dominant as “Joy to the World,” a distant second with 391 records to its name. As one might surmise, songs that are no longer under their original copyright are considerably more prominent on modern Christmas albums, given that one needn’t share the holiday windfall. This lends an obvious advantage to the ecclesiastical hymns and tunes, like “O Holy Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” As intellectual property lawyer Paul C. Jorgensen explains, this does nothing to prevent artists from copyrighting their own recording of a song and collecting royalties whenever a radio station wants to play it–assuming the other 732 renditions weren’t to taste. Nor is it strictly limited to American recording artists. “A lot of international artists will go ahead and register things in the United States,” Jorgensen said. To determine secularity, TIME measured the likelihood that a song appears on the same album with either “What Child Is This?”, a decidedly devout 1865 tune, or “Jingle Bell Rock,” roughly it’s polar opposite. (The choice of those two songs is rather arbitrary, but proved in trial and error to offer the clearest dichotomy.) In true Christmas spirit, “Silent Night” aptly bridges that great divide: It co-headlines with just about anyone. **Methodology** This project began by downloading every copyrighted recording of “Jingle Bells,” then expanding to every song on the same album as “Jingle Bells,” and so forth until the universe of Christmas music was exhausted. The data only includes “sound recording” records from the Copyright Office, as opposed to sheet music arrangements, videos, and other formats in which one might copyright a song. Variations on the same material, such as “O Christmas Tree” and “O Tannenbaum,” where grouped as one song. _Design by Alexander Ho_ ## Transcript [ NOISE ] [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/"},"headline":"This Is the Most Popular Christmas Song Ever","datePublished":"2014-12-02T14:49:24.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:48:38.568Z","description":"TIME crunches the merry numbers behind the most popular Christmas songs of the modern era","url":"https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/","keywords":["Newsfeed","society","U.S."],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Chris Wilson","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-newsfeed/","name":"Newsfeed"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/","name":"This Is the Most Popular Christmas Song Ever"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"See The Unique Way Amazon Ships This Teddy Bear","description":"Go Behind the Scenes at Amazon to see how the products you buy make it to the shipping truck","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/IY8KG0y3/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-12-01T04:19:45.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/IY8KG0y3.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/","duration":"PT2M54S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3613551/christmas-song/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```