It’s a bit of a surprise after 30 years into a pop career that Gary has only just got around to making a Christmas album.

million chart sales, and four of its tracks rank among the Top 40 most-streamed Christmas songs, led by It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas, with 126 million plays. It’s also not the first time digital trickery has been utilised with the star, as his daughter Natalie Cole has “duetted” with him on two collections – 1991’s Unforgettable and 2009’s Still Unforgettable.

Nat King Cole’s Christmas legacy is secure already with his The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on An Open Fire), a song he first recorded in 1946 and which was massively successful in the pre-chart era.

The album has since been superseded by subsequent two-disc and later three-disc releases in the 2000s. The new edition of Everyday Is Christmas adds two more new songs – Pin Drop and Santa Visits Everyone – as well as a 'Slowed Down and Snowed In' remix of Snowman. In and around those 70s/80s classics are old timers like Sinatra, Crosby, Martin, Williams, King Cole and ‘newbies’ such as Kelly Clarkson, Leona Lewis, Ed Sheeran, George Ezra and Alexandra Burke. Seeing as the Official Singles Chart now becomes flooded with yule-themed bops of all vintages each Christmas, this year’s will be the most contemporary, most streamed and chart-busting album imaginable, as the combined figures of streams and sales for the likes of Wham! That album is ten years old this year, and to celebrate, everyone’s favourite crooner is reissuing it with seven new tracks.

While over in the UK, punters haven’t been too fussed about Wrapped In Red as a whole – preferring the single Underneath The Tree, which reached an Official Singles Chart high of Number 15 last year and clocking 84 million streams to date. Originally released in 2017, Everyday Is Christmas yielded the song Santa’s Coming For Us, a Top 20 hit in 2019, while last year saw the song Snowman crack the Top 100. Various rerecordings have been a part of festivities ever since, and it’s been covered by numerous turns such as Frank Sinatra, Luther Vandross, Shawn Mendes and Ne-Yo, although Nat’s version has only charted as high as Number 51 as recently as 2020. The Pogues, Chris Rea, Band Aid, Wizzard, Shakin’ Stevens, Chris Rea, Saint Etienne, Slade, Justin Bieber and more are truly eye-watering.

It’s hard to understand why Kate wouldn’t want her Christmas song on a Christmas compilation, but there you go. A welcome addition to the Christmas canon this year comes from Norah Jones and her I Dream Of Christmas, of which she says the inspiration came from “listening to James Brown’s Funky Christmas and Elvis’s Christmas Album on Sundays during lockdown for a sense of comfort. If you are wondering why Kate Bush’s ‘December Could Be Magic Again’ is missing (either in standard, or rare ‘bongo version’ form) it’s because, as SDE understands it, the licensing request was refused.

He’s unleashed his first solo Christmas album, having been involved with three Glee Christmas releases in 2010, 2011 and 2012, and it comes with the very hohoho title of A Very Darren Crissmas.