Music: Holy Night, 1952

Across the U.S. last week, air waves, nurseries and barrooms echoed with a song called / Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. To a tune that is basically old reliable corn syrup, with occasional chorus and chime effects added, it tells the story of a child who does some Christmas Eve snooping when he (she) should have been asleep. Nothing else in the lyrics is quite up to the title-line. Sample:

She didn’t see me creep Down the stairs to have a peep, She thought that I was tucked up In my bedroom fast asleep.

But record buyers are finding it irresistible; in less than ten weeks, more than 2,000,000 records have been released by Columbia, Victor, Decca, Capitol and MGM. By all signs, it should be an even greater success than the 1948 hit, All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.

Columbia got a head start on the others, and has already sold more than 1,000,000 copies to U.S. dealers. This makes something of an overnight national musical figure out of Columbia’s vocalist: a twelve-year-old freckle-patch named Jimmy Boyd, of Van Nuys, Calif., who has had his own radio program in Los Angeles and is a veteran of five years in show business.

Jimmy is brighter than the boy in I Saw Mommy, etc. He knows who Santa Claus is. But even Jimmy was surprised by the success of the song. “I like it personally,” he says, “but I didn’t think anyone would buy it.”