.

Probably purely due to it's residency at No.1 over Xmas 87 but one I always associated with Christmas.

See also: "Caravan of Love" - The Housemartins.

it's Collins' 'Another Day in Paradise'. There was just something particularly special about that Christmas. Might be wrong in thinking they were the same year but 'Back to Life' by Soul 2 Soul has a similar effect.

By Tears for Fears, but mainly by whoever put it to number one a few years back...

I got the Back To Mono box set for my birthday one year and so played it throughout December. Aside from A Christmas Gift For You, none of it is remotely Christmassy but nevertheless sounds rather apt to me at this time of year. And to my daughter, who remembers that December and always used to refer to it as Christmas music.

A case in point:

I know you're all going to say that this is because the production is so similar to the Christmas album. But hey.

Got your cold and grey Chigago morn and a charriddible message.

Stop the Calvary.

Makes him a mint even though it was just a song that mentions Christmas twice. Genius.

Christmas 1963. We lived in Liverpool. My mum & dad had just bought their first record player, a Dansette. This single was one of my Christmas presents,alongside a Blow Football game. I was 9 and hooked for life. Thousands of singles, LP's, cassettes, CD's later and I've still got that old 45rpm record. My sister got 'Glad All Over' by The Dave Clark Five in her stocking, and my mum & dad bought themselves 'With The Beatles'.
The esteemed music writer Paul Du Noyer was one of my best mates at the time, and we played those records to death. Paul didn't have a record player at the time, but another mate Ronnie Hughes had, and acquired some of the Phil Spector singles by the Crystals and Ronnettes. Happy days.

By ABBA, reminds me of the Christmas when I was 11, which was probably the last Christmas I think of as during my childhood. After that I hit the long crawl of puberty. Christmas was never the same.

and this was always on the telly

There are certain songs that make no explicit mention of Christmas; nevertheless there is something in their lyrics or their arrangements that makes them feel of the season.

Last Stop This Town by The Eels is Mark Everett’s attempt at coming to terms with his sister’s suicide. About a minute and a half in, after the line “What if I was not your only friend in this world, would you take me where you 're going if you 're never coming back?” there’s a synthy, choiry bit that feels wintry and magical. It’s as if the song was written with the December festivities as a backdrop, but with the focus elsewhere.

Equally Christmassy is the chiming piano that begins the Tom Wait’s tearjerker - Martha. The scenario - A desperately lonely old man phoning a former lover, who he hasn’t had any contact with for over 40 years, is the kind of thing that you can imagine happening at this time of year, when one is acutely aware of friends and family, or their absence if you have nobody.

Somehow both of these songs seem truer than the standards currently blasting out of supermarket public address systems. A lot of Christmas music is wilfully shallow; relentlessly cheerful to the point where it becomes self defeating because you don’t really believe in it. I think the best festive songs inhabit the gap between our expectations and the reality. That’s where you find the humanity and ultimately Christmas is about people.

Missed out on the Christmas number 1 by a couple of places.