This song, which debuted in 1963, turns up among Billboard’s top 10 holiday songs every year, and I’d argue it owes its popularity to a TV commercial that wasn’t about Christmas at all.
At one point in the 1970s Andy Williams was known as “Mr. Christmas,” for good reason. He hosted a holiday version of his TV variety show almost every year for two decades, and he also recorded eight holiday albums among his 47 LPs. “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was written by the musical director of his TV show, George Wyle, and appeared on the first of Williams’ holiday records. Columbia didn’t even release it as a single, going instead with a cover of “White Christmas,” the ’60s-crooner equivalent of a figure skater’s compulsory exercises.
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s you heard the song occasionally, but it wasn’t canonical before 1996. That’s when it was first used as the soundtrack to a Staples TV spot that showed a joyous parent dancing down the aisles gathering back-to-school supplies, trailed by his glum kids. The campaign ran for years, which is why I can’t hear the song without remembering those years when Labor Day was, indeed, the most wonderful time of the year.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but before that commercial aired only a handful of people recorded the song. Since then there have been more than 300 covers.
One line tends to confound people: “There’ll be scary ghost stories.” The only ghosts we associate with Christmas nowadays are the ones who haunt Ebenezer Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol,” but in Charles Dickens’ time ghost stories were traditional Christmas Eve entertainment. They regarded the night as Americans now do Halloween, a time when the boundary between the physical and spirit worlds grows thin and specters stalk the Earth. The reference does seem out of place when the rest of the song is so jaunty.
Here’s the original Staples ad.
