Christmas Playlist: What Holiday Songs Really Say About Work and Rest

Finito World

Every December, the same musical workforce clocks in for duty. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, making it not just the best-selling Christmas single but the best-selling single of all time. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” hit one billion Spotify streams, while Wham!’s “Last Christmas” achieved the same milestone. These aren’t just songs—they’re annual revenue generators, artistic temp workers who show up reliably each winter to perform the same emotional labour.

Of course, it can sometimes be a little difficult to get excited about the same songs – especially as one hits middle age. And yet there is a sort of justice about the calendar whereby each year as 1st December 2025 rolls round I am ready to hear the Pogues again, ready for Noddy Holder’s gigantic shout of ‘It’s Christmas’ and prepared also to consider again the Band Aid single.

Over the years, I’ve begun to sense something a little more interesting beneath the clutch of favourites which make up our Christmas music playlist. Beneath the sleigh bells and seasonal sentiment lies something more complex: a catalogue of attitudes toward work, rest, and the promise of temporary escape from ordinary life. Christmas songs, it turns out, are workplace psychology disguised as holiday cheer.

The Economics of Nostalgia

The numbers tell a fascinating story about artistic longevity versus contemporary relevance. According to Nielsen data, just 35% of holiday songs played on radio in 2016 were recorded before 1990, suggesting that despite our attachment to “classics,” the Christmas music economy is more dynamic than commonly believed. Yet the biggest earners remain songs that traffic in very specific fantasies about leisure and abundance.

“White Christmas” represents perhaps the ultimate work-avoidance anthem. Irving Berlin’s creation doesn’t just dream of a white Christmas – it dreams of escape from wherever the singer currently finds themselves. The Christmases the singer used to know seem to predate all the little plans we make – to relocate real life in a realm before, and therefore beyond, ambition, at a time when the thought of being sidetracked by such things as mortgages and return on investment was plain absurd.

The song was written in Beverly Hills and first performed by Bing Crosby in the film “Holiday Inn,” establishing a template that would endure: Christmas music as aspirational geography, promising a future which somehow contains the best bits of the past. Paul Simon called it the perfect song, and it’s difficult to disagree with that: its melody feels sweet and elegiac but it also comes off an edgy chromatic scale – the syllables of the word Christmas are on the chord F sharp and G. But it never loses its casual looping smoothness and its ability to convince you that there might be the day when you open your curtains and everything you’d hoped for suddenly turns out to be the case.

The song’s enduring appeal might be that it captures something essential about modern work: the feeling of being displaced, of longing for a “home” that exists more in memory than geography. For Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant, and for millions of listeners since, Christmas becomes shorthand for belonging somewhere you’re not currently stuck.

Santa As Employer

No analysis of Christmas work themes would be complete without examining the holiday’s most prominent employer. Santa Claus represents the ultimate seasonal business model: a massive global operation that employs elves year-round for a single night’s delivery schedule. It’s either inspiring entrepreneurship or a logistical nightmare, depending on your perspective.

At the risk of sounding suddenly like The Guardian, the traditional Santa narrative could be said to gloss over some uncomfortable workplace realities. The elves work for no apparent wages, living in company housing in conditions that would violate numerous employment laws. Santa himself operates as the kind of CEO who maintains personal oversight of every operation while somehow also serving as the primary delivery driver – a model that sounds suspiciously like modern gig economy thinking. He is a little like Jeff Bezos in his early Amazon days, only with much more hair.

Understandably, the songs about Santa generally avoid these labour questions, instead focusing on his magical efficiency. But they reveal our ambivalence about work itself: we celebrate Santa’s operation precisely because it appears to function without the friction, politics, and inequality that characterise most actual workplaces.

He’s the boss who never downsizes, never relocates operations overseas, and somehow maintains employee loyalty despite offering no career advancement opportunities.

The Mariah Carey Industrial Complex

Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You recently reached 1 billion streams, making it not just a song but a financial ecosystem. It’s one of those songs whose melody sounds unrecognisable if you try to sing it yourself – it depends entirely on vocal acrobatics which it is definitely not a good idea to attempt by oneself at a piano.

What’s particularly interesting about Carey’s Christmas dominance is how the song functions as both labour and leisure. For Carey, it’s become her most reliable income source – a single recording that generates millions annually with no additional effort required.

For listeners, the song promises the opposite: freedom from want, the reduction of desire to its simplest form. The title itself is anti-materialist, anti-commercial, positioning love as the alternative to the consumer frenzy that Christmas has become. Yet this anti-commercial message has generated more commercial success than almost any other Christmas song. Carey has found a way not to have to work again – while seeming to tout the message that love is all she wants.

The irony would be perfect if it weren’t so common. Modern Christmas music often protests against commercialisation while participating enthusiastically in it. The songs that make the most money are frequently the ones that claim money doesn’t matter – a contradiction that feels very contemporary. It’s also, for the unlucky majority who haven’t had a Christmas hit, who find we must somehow set aside a grand or so, while humming the tunes of multimillionaires for whom that’s a paltry amount of money. On the other hand, we don’t really mind because someone has to write the songs, and it would be mad to suppose there’d be no reward for doing so.

The Work-Life Balance Crisis

Christmas songs reveal a particular anxiety about leisure that speaks to modern workplace culture. Many classic holiday songs aren’t really about Christmas – they’re about the promise of time off. ‘Silver Bells’ celebrates city Christmas specifically because it represents a break from urban work routine. ‘Let It Snow’ isn’t about winter weather—it’s about having an excuse to stay home from whatever you’re supposed to be doing.

This theme has intensified in recent decades as work-life boundaries have blurred. Contemporary Christmas songs increasingly focus on the difficulty of achieving the domestic harmony that older Christmas music took for granted. The challenge isn’t just finding time for family – it’s finding mental space for the kind of presence that Christmas is supposed to represent.

‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! exemplifies this shift. Rather than promising seasonal joy, it’s explicitly about romantic and emotional labour that extends across calendar years. The song acknowledges that Christmas doesn’t actually pause normal life – it just provides a backdrop for the same relationships, disappointments, and complications that exist all year. It’s Christmas realism disguised as Christmas pop – and it made of George Michael a sort of modern patron saint of Christmas before he even died on Christmas Day – his solitude an image of real poignancy.

The Productivity Paradox

Holiday songs dominate streaming charts each December, with 13 in the top 25 and 19 in the top 50 on recent Billboard Hot 100 charts, representing a fascinating example of seasonal productivity. These songs perform virtually no labour for 11 months of the year, then generate massive engagement and revenue in December – the ultimate example of seasonal employment.

For the music industry, Christmas songs represent the perfect product: content that audiences reliably consume annually with minimal marketing required. It’s the artistic equivalent of subscription revenue, providing predictable income that subsidises riskier creative investments throughout the year.

But this reliability creates its own pressures. Musicians face the challenge of creating “new Christmas classics” that can compete with songs that have had decades to embed themselves in cultural memory. As economist Jadrian Wooten notes, this raises the question: “Why aren’t musicians churning out new holiday tunes each year?” The answer reveals something about both artistic economics and cultural attachment: breaking into the Christmas rotation requires not just a good song but a song that can compete with decades of nostalgic association. It’s difficult to think of a real Christmas classic over the past decade or so: perhaps those who could deliver it – one thinks of McCartney, or Elton John – have already more or less done it and so don’t need to do so again.

The Global Workplace Christmas

Social media analysis shows that ‘Last Christmas’ remains popular even in markets like Czech Republic, suggesting that Christmas music has become part of a global emotional economy. Research data supports this widespread appeal: 32 percent of Americans say that listening to Christmas music is “great,” with just eight percent calling Christmas songs “terrible”. However, studies reveal regional variations in tolerance, with 17% of US shoppers and 25% of British shoppers “actively” disliking Christmas music when played in retail environments.

These songs cross cultural and linguistic boundaries, creating shared seasonal experiences for workers worldwide. The psychological impact is measurable: workplace music research shows that 73% of warehouse workers were more productive when there was background music playing, and 65% of businesses thought music made them more productive. Yet Christmas music specifically can have the opposite effect when overplayed, with studies indicating that hearing Christmas songs too many times increases stress, and retail research finding that shoppers reported being over 20% less likely to shop at stores when Christmas music was playing.

But this globalisation reveals some interesting contradictions. Christmas music spreads workplace culture more effectively than workplace rights. Harvard Business Review research highlights how cultural differences and divergent expectations around workplace norms can be sources of friction for multinational companies, while employment law experts note that different cultures have unique expectations around work-life balance, management styles, and career paths. The same companies that maintain different employment standards in different countries will play the same Christmas playlist in all their locations, creating the illusion of shared values while maintaining very different employment practices.

This disparity is particularly stark when considering global engagement metrics. Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, with lost productivity costing the global economy $438 billion, yet companies continue investing in uniform cultural symbols like seasonal music rather than addressing fundamental workplace inequality across their international operations. Employment law specialists observe that HR teams must navigate varying compensation, benefits, tax rates, and labour regulations, which may conflict with corporate policies, creating a system where the soundtrack remains consistent while the substance of worker experience varies dramatically by geography.

The January Problem

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Christmas music is what happens when it stops. The same songs that generate billions of streams in December become virtually unlistenable in January – not because they’re bad songs, but because they’ve served their emotional function and now represent obligation rather than pleasure.

This seasonal cycle mirrors many workplace dynamics: the intense engagement followed by equally intense disengagement, the way activities that generate genuine enthusiasm can become oppressive through repetition and requirement. Christmas music embodies the modern work challenge of maintaining authentic engagement with activities that have been systematized and commercialized.

Not all Christmas music accepts its assigned emotional labour gracefully. Songs like “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues or “Christmas Time Is Here” by Vince Guaraldi offer different models: Christmas music that acknowledges complexity, disappointment, and the gap between seasonal aspiration and daily reality. The Pogues song is by far the greatest – and I’ll never forget the joy of Shane McGowan’s funeral and the sense that it’s the only song to transcend the season: it’s still a great song in July.

These songs suggest alternative approaches to both holiday celebration and work culture: the possibility of engagement that doesn’t require false enthusiasm, community that accommodates disagreement, and seasonal observance that doesn’t demand uniform emotional response.
Christmas songs endure because they offer what most workplace culture cannot: the promise of time when different values might apply, when efficiency and productivity take second place to connection and celebration. Music experts note what makes holiday hits timeless often relates to their ability to capture universal experiences of longing, belonging, and temporary escape from routine obligations. In a world where work increasingly colonizes personal time and mental space, Christmas music provides a sanctioned break – even if that break has become another form of work.

The real insight might be that Christmas songs succeed not despite their contradictions but because of them. They acknowledge what most workplace culture cannot: that the promise of balance between employment and leisure, obligation and joy, individual success and community belonging, remains mostly unfulfilled. They don’t resolve these tensions – they just provide a seasonal soundtrack for living with them.
In the end, Christmas music functions like the holidays themselves: a systematic break from systematic thinking, a commercialized protest against commercialization, a collective agreement to temporarily prioritize values that we struggle to maintain year-round. Whether that makes it the ultimate workplace perk or the ultimate workplace manipulation probably depends on which side of the playlist you’re on.