Led by Mariah Carey, holiday songs dominate the charts for one last week

It’s a week of chart milestones, as holiday songs hold down the top 24 spots on the Billboard Hot 100, Mariah Carey extends multiple chart records and Taylor Swift pulls out all the stops to defeat her latest rival, an upstart by the name of Bing Crosby.

TOP STORY

This was destined to be a Christmas-y week on the Hot 100: The week’s chart reflects seven full days of holiday listening — streaming, airplay, sales — spanning from Dec. 19 through Dec. 25, with no post-holiday lull to even lightly depress the numbers. Holiday songs now take up every one of the top 24 spots. About this time last year, they only took up 16.

Still, it’s remarkable to examine how thoroughly the Hot 100 has been transformed in the streaming era. This week, just four of the top 50 songs are non-holiday titles. (More on those below.) But if you scan the Hot 100 from exactly 10 years ago — it takes a Billboard subscription to do so — you’ll spot three holiday songs on the entire chart: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” rising to its then-peak at No. 18, The Voice winner Jordan Smith’s “Mary Did You Know” debuting at No. 24 and Brenda Lee‘s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” climbing to No. 38. In a single decade, streaming has turned the Christmas Hot 100 inside-out.

Year-over-year, the changes are more incremental. But a few milestones are worth noting as 2025’s holiday season draws mercifully to a close:

• “All I Want for Christmas Is You” extends at least three all-time Hot 100 records this week. It’s No. 1 for a 22nd nonconsecutive week. It gives Carey her 101st overall week at No. 1. (Rihanna is in second place all-time, with 60.) And, because this week’s chart is dated Jan. 2, 2026, Carey has already notched her 22nd calendar year in which one of her songs hits No. 1. That’s… a lot, especially when you consider that she’d have the all-time record even without “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
• It speaks to both the power of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and the recency of the holidays’ chart dominance that only three holiday songs have hit No. 1 since the Hot 100’s creation in 1958: The other two are Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which briefly surpassed Carey in 2023, and The Chipmunks‘ “The Christmas Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” in the chart’s first year of existence. So it’s worth noting when a holiday title notches its first-ever week at No. 2; last week, Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” did just that. Helms, Lee and Wham! (with “Last Christmas”) have all hit No. 2 during this holiday season.
• Michael Bublé has become one of the faces of Christmas — it’s the one that looks unnervingly like Robin Thicke — but he’s still never hit the Hot 100’s top 10. “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” tops out at No. 13 this week. Bublé does better on the albums chart, where Christmas sits at No. 3, perhaps because his music works better as wallpaper than as individual songs.
• Vince Guaraldi Trio‘s album A Charlie Brown Christmas has boomed this holiday season — it’s currently at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 — and its signature song (“Christmastime Is Here”) leaps from No. 36 to a new peak at No. 23.

TOP ALBUMS

The Hot 100 isn’t the only Billboard chart dominated by the holidays this week. The Billboard 200 albums chart also sets a record, as seven titles turn up in the top 10 for the first time ever. And Bing Crosby’s own Ultimate Christmas pulls off the biggest streaming week for any holiday album in history.

That’s all plenty impressive, but not even Der Bingle himself can unseat the queen of chart manipulation: At No. 1 for an 11th nonconsecutive week is Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl.

How’d she do it? Well, you have to go back to Nov. 24 — that’s the day Swift’s website opened a 24-hour window for fans to order three new vinyl variant editions of the album. (This is on top of the dozens of vinyl versions already in circulation.) Her people took all those preorders, sat on them, then shipped them on or just after Dec. 19. Because webstore sales don’t count until copies are shipped, The Life of a Showgirl got credit for those Nov. 24 sales during this week’s window of chart eligibility.

In other words, if you bought one or more of those vinyl variants as a gift and it didn’t show up until after Christmas, you can take solace in the fact that your dollars helped Taylor Swift defeat Bing Crosby and secure that all-important 11th week at No. 1. A grateful nation heaves a sigh of relief.

TOP SONGS

With the possible exception of an “Auld Lang Syne” here and there, next week’s Hot 100 is likely to be bereft of holiday titles. That’s going to mean massive chart turnover, given that 49 holiday songs turn up on this week’s chart. (Old songs that have charted before are only eligible for the Hot 100 if they hit the top 50.)

If you’re looking for post-holiday trends worth watching, start by considering the four non-Christmas-adjacent songs that managed to squeeze into this week’s top 50: HUNTR/X’s “Golden,” Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” Olivia Dean‘s “Man I Need” and Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.”

“Golden” hits a major milestone this week, as it tops the Radio Songs chart for the first time — and becomes the first-ever K-pop song to do so. “The Fate of Ophelia” will surely give “Golden” a run for its money next week, given the likelihood that Swift has just shipped an exclusive variant edition on piano roll or something. (We haven’t checked, but wouldn’t be surprised.) “Man I Need” is still surging, as are several of Dean’s other songs. And “Choosin’ Texas” looks poised to land Langley in the top 10 for the first time in her career.

Speaking of chart milestones, three other songs are nicely positioned to enjoy their first-ever visits to the top 10 next week. If you simply subtract all the holiday tracks from this week’s chart, the rapper Pooh Shiesty would sit at No. 7 with his post-prison comeback song “FDO,” RAYE would hit No. 9 with “Where Is My Husband!” and Olivia Dean would land a second top 10 hit with “So Easy (To Fall in Love).” Other factors will surely come into play, but a little chart turnover is always welcome.