For this second day of 12 days of classic Christmas songs, we’re featuring “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” by Andy Williams. This tune first appeared on the 1962 Christmas episode of his TV show and was put to vinyl on Mr. Williams’ 1963 album, The Andy Williams Christmas Album. It was not released as a single at the time, although it was in subsequent years. (In 2020, for example, it peaked at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100.)
“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” is known for verbizing a bunch of Christmas-related nouns, such as “jingle belling” and “mistletoeing,” which is questionable but acceptable this time of the year. It also has a line about “scary ghost stories,” which I assume is a reference to the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” unless there’s some other holiday horror story of which I’m unaware. (Actually, there used to be a Victorian tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmastime, although that tradition fell into disuse some time ago.)
For you young ‘uns out there, Andy Williams was a big deal in his day, with his own weekly variety show and yearly Christmas specials. He was more comforting than hip, in both appearance and performance. His TV show, imaginatively titled The Andy Williams Show, featured white bread performers such as the Osmond Brothers, the New Christy Minstrels, and the Lennon Sisters. (Jonathan Winters was also a frequent guest, which kind of rescued the whole thing.) His holiday specials were family affairs, with everyone wearing heavy Christmas sweaters in the fake snow under the hot studio lights, lip syncing away. Spanning the years from 1962 to 1971, his show was kind of an alternate reality to the chaos that was the 1960s.
The song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle, who collectively wrote a lot of music for TV shows back in the 1960s. Wyle, for example, co-wrote the Gilligan’s Island theme song, so there’s that. Wyle also happened to be the vocal director for The Andy Williams Show in the early ’60s, and stepped up when they needed a tune for the 1962-1963 season’s Christmas show.
Here’s how Mr. Williams remembers it:
“George Wyle, who is a vocal director, who wrote all of the choir stuff and all of the duets and trios and things that I did with all the guests, he wrote a song just for the show—I think the second Christmas show we did—called ‘Most Wonderful Time of the Year’. So I did that, you know, every Christmas, and then other people started doing it. And then suddenly it’s become—not suddenly but over 30 years—it’s become a big standard. I think it’s one of the top ten Christmas songs of all time now.”
As he noted, Mr. Williams performed this tune in various stagings for every Christmas show every year after that. It’s a staple on Christmas radio, and for good reason—it’s a pretty good tune, scary ghost stories aside. After all, you just can’t have enough jingle belling and mistletoeing!
