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."
He explains the seeming contradiction, saying Christmas songs can be granted a wider latitude because "our affection for them is not about any intrinsic compositional qualities, but simply the association that we have with the season and with the festivities and with family and joy and comfort."
Annie Zaleski, the author of This Is Christmas, Song by Song: The Stories Behind 100 Holiday Hits, puts herself "firmly in the camp" of those who love the song. "I think it speaks to Paul McCartney's strength… his ability to sort of cover this wide spectrum from serious to really fun and whimsical," she says.
She also understands the point of view of those bivouacked in the haters camp. The repetition and the "fairly nonsensical" lyrics aside, "I think people were used to Paul writing these very deep songs that have a lot of meaning, and this is basically a musical celebration… it's also, you know, fairly lightweight for him."
Another defender is music journalist Allison Rapp, who says the first thing to understand is that McCartney has always had a silly side. He wrote "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude," but also "When I'm 64."
"If you like the Beatles and you like Paul McCartney, then you understand that spectrum has been in place for years," she says.
Some would say that "Wonderful Christmastime" also suffers from comparison to Beatles bandmate John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" co-written with Yoko Ono and released eight years earlier. That's unfair, Thompson says, "because those songs have 180-degree diametrically opposite goals."
"Lennon is taking a much, much bigger swing with that song… about uniting the world and ending war," he adds.
Rapp, for one, thinks the anti-war message of the Lennon song is too preachy for the holidays. "To me, if I had to pick one over the other, it certainly would be 'Wonderful Christmastime.'"
NPR reached out to McCartney's representatives in the U.S. and U.K., but they declined to comment for this story. In 2022, the artist himself was quoted on paulmccartney.com as saying he likes Christmas songs because they "remind us of the fun atmosphere of the whole season."
'[W]hen I was writing 'Wonderful Christmastime' I was trying to capture that party aspect," he said. "I did hope it would keep coming back – which it has. Sometimes people will go into a shop and hear it a little too much, but I don't care! I'm happy!"
Criticism aside, Thompson says it's really difficult to find new things to say about the holidays. While McCartney may have fallen short, "if you hit it — if you write [Mariah Carey's] 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' — you're set for life," he says. "Having a holiday standard guarantees immortality."
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