Is Paul McCartney's 'Wonderful Christmastime' simply… horrible?

There are almost certainly worse holiday songs than Paul McCartney's 1979 "Wonderful Christmastime." But in a genre famous for cheesiness, it stands out as among the most polarizing. And it's notable for being written by the same Beatle who penned "Let It Be" on the band's final album.

The song? You know the one where McCartney sings "Simply having a wonderful Christmastime" a dozen times while a chorus of children chime in with "Ding dong, ding dong …" In the 46 years since it was released, it has become a seasonal staple — in inescapable rotation on radio, department store elevator music and streaming services.

For some, it's charming and joyful. For many others, it's hackneyed and repetitive. The vitriol against "Wonderful Christmastime" routinely lands it on perennial lists of the worst Christmas songs.

NPR Music's Stephen Thompson learned to abhor the song while working as a stocker at a grocery store in Iola, Wis., in the late 1980s.

"I hate that song," he says. It seemed to play nonstop for the whole of December, he recalls. "It's this insistent, tinny little synth-pop earworm that once it gets that hook under your skin, you can't shake it. And not in a good way."

"Paul McCartney did not try very hard to come up with a unique sentiment," he adds. "It's just this kind of cheerful trifle." Ted Montgomery is the author of The Paul McCartney Catalog and The Beatles Through Headphones. "The bar is so high with McCartney because he's such a great songwriter," he says. "We don't need to list all the classic songs he's written."

But just for fun, let's: As a member of the Fab Four, McCartney composed enduring classics such as "Eleanor Rigby" and "The Long and Winding Road." In his post-Beatles days, he produced songs such as "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "With a Little Luck." It would be difficult to find a bigger McCartney fan than Montgomery, even for him though, "Wonderful Christmastime" is a bridge too far.

"The greatest thing about this song is they only play it between Thanksgiving and Christmas," he says. In Catalog, his take is even harsher: the instrumentation is "amateurish and banal" and the lyrics "embarrassing," he writes. One of Montgomery's biggest gripes is "it's all synth."

In 1979, the versatile Yamaha CS-80 had just come out. Although the synthesizer — an electronic instrument that combines sound waves to create music — wasn't new in the pop world, the Yamaha quickly caught on, and McCartney was an early adopter. The 1970s and 1980s were the golden age of the synthesizer and artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Toto and Bruce Springsteen employed the CS-80 around the same time. Montgomery acknowledges that synthesizers were all the rage at the time, "but I don't like that," he says. "I'm a purist when it comes to music. I like real instruments."

Composer and musicologist Nate Sloan takes a more nuanced view. While he rates the song "pretty far at the bottom" of all the pop songs of the late '70s, "in terms of the Christmas canon, I think that's a different story. I think this is a fantastic Christmas song."

Source: Scott Neuman/NPR

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