The 40 Best Christmas Songs of All Time, Ranked by Billboard Chart Weeks and Certified Sales

How We Ranked These 40 Songs

We ranked these 40 songs on two numbers: cumulative weeks charted on Billboard's Holiday 100 (and, for pre-2011 songs, their Hot 100 and retail-chart history), and RIAA certification level, pulled straight from Billboard's chart archives and the RIAA's certification database. No critics' polls, no vibes, no radio-airplay tallies. Just chart math and sales data.

That methodology matches conventional wisdom at the top of the list and breaks from it the further down you go: decades-old radio staples that never converted into RIAA-certified sales turn up well outside the top 10.

The Untouchable No. 1: Mariah Carey — "All I Want for Christmas Is You"

There isn't a close second. Carey wrote "All I Want for Christmas Is You" with Walter Afanasieff, recorded it in August 1994, and released it on Columbia that October as the lead single from her first holiday album, Merry Christmas. On Billboard's Holiday 100 chart, it has spent the overwhelming majority of the chart's weeks at No. 1, a near-total monopoly on the top spot since the chart's modern tracking began. The RIAA's own database confirms the ceiling: as of December 15, 2025, the single is certified 18x Platinum — equivalent to roughly 18 million units sold, the highest certification level of any holiday single on record.

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The Songs That Actually Challenge Her — Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms

If anything comes close to Carey's dominance, it's two 1950s recordings that took the long road. Brenda Lee's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," cut in 1958, is now RIAA-certified 7x Platinum, and in December 2023 it finally hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time.

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Bobby Helms' "Jingle Bell Rock" has an even older claim to legitimacy: it was one of just nine Christmas singles to chart when Billboard published its first dedicated Christmas-records survey in 1957, debuting on the Top 100 Sides at No. 6. Nearly 70 Decembers later, it's still the most reliable No. 2 on the chart, perennially chasing Carey without ever quite catching her.

The Full Top 40 Ranked by Weeks on Chart and Certification

Every song's peak chart position, how long it has stuck around, and its RIAA certification tier are below. Pre-1958 peak positions and weeks are drawn from Billboard's own retrospective chart surveys; everything from the 2010s forward reflects the Holiday 100.

If you'd rather test your own ear for hits than argue about this table, our Pop quiz is built from the same kind of chart-dominant catalog these artists came from.

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Pre-Streaming-Era Giants vs. Modern Streaming Hits

Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" is still, by Guinness World Records' reckoning, the best-selling single in recorded-music history: more than 50 million copies worldwide. It earned that status the hard way: 11 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Best Selling Retail Records chart starting October 31, 1942, a return to the top in 1945, and a 14th nonconsecutive week at No. 1 on December 28, 1946. None of that happened on a streaming-blended chart, because none existed yet. Nielsen SoundScan didn't arrive until 1991, and the Holiday 100 not until 2011.

Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me" (2014) and Justin Bieber's "Mistletoe" (2011, 1.1 million digital downloads per Nielsen SoundScan) show the other end of that gap. Those songs climb every December because the modern Hot 100 and Holiday 100 blend streaming, airplay, and sales in real time, letting a song re-enter and re-climb algorithmically, something Crosby-era hits never had the infrastructure to do. Wham!'s "Last Christmas," now 9x Platinum per the RIAA, sits in between: an '80s song that didn't become a true chart-topper until the streaming era caught up with it decades later. (We covered that decade's own chart logic in The 40 Best 80s Songs, Ranked by Chart Peaks & Certifications.)

Songs the Radio Loves That the Numbers Don't Back Up

Some of the most-played Christmas songs on terrestrial radio land in the bottom third of this list. Perry Como's "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and Nat King Cole's "The Christmas Song" are both Gold-certified, decades-old airplay staples, but neither carries the certification tier or chart-week total of songs half their age. Donny Hathaway's "This Christmas," a holiday radio fixture in R&B formats (our R&B/Soul quiz is a good companion for that catalog), is in the same spot: beloved, but not backed by Diamond- or multi-Platinum-level numbers. That gap is the point of ranking by Holiday 100 weeks and RIAA certification instead of by ear: airplay reputation and certified sales measure two different things.

What the Data Says About How a Christmas Song Becomes Immortal

Two patterns explain almost every song on this list. The first is the multi-decade climb: Brenda Lee's 65 years to No. 1, or Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," which flopped on release in 1963, didn't even chart on the Hot 100 until December 2018 — debuting at No. 50 — and only reached No. 7 on the Holiday 100 in 2021, a song written by Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich, and Phil Spector that took nearly 60 years to find its chart moment. The second is the instant modern smash: Mariah Carey's single went from release to fixture in a handful of seasons, and Justin Bieber's "Mistletoe" did the same on a smaller scale. One path is a slow burn measured in decades. The other is algorithmic, measured in seasons. Either way, the chart data is what tells you which.