Are these songs on your festive playlist? Picture: Supplied There are songs that you would playlist only once a year. Because there is cheese, and then there is Christmas cheese.
It’s the tunes that have replaced Boney M’sDrummer Boyin shopping malls, lifts, restaurants and everywhere. It’s the songs that you cannot escape, yet inevitably, at least half of them feature on your own playlist during festive lunches and dinners. Here’s the Top 10 Hit Parade of holiday cheese that can sometimes be enough to cut shopping expeditions short and make online ordering so much more appealing, because nobody has to listen to how malls and restaurants and entertainment complexes suffocate music.
South Africa became a democracy in 1994, and Christmas became a Carey power ballad-dominated cheese fest in the same year. The track has wedged itself into almost everyone’s festive seasons and, surprisingly, only topped the charts in 2019, twenty-five years after its release. gifted the world the happiest breakup song ever written in 1984.
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It’s eighties nostalgia and played as a festive, happy tune despite its sad content. Yet, wherever you go, the song plays. Every year.
Like clockwork. It’s one of history’s slowest rises to the top. First recorded in 1958, it took almost eighty years to peak at the top of the charts in 2023.
Now, it’s everywhere. When you cannot sleep on Christmas Eve, play this song. It’s slow, cute and romantic and has become one of the best-selling singles in modern musical history.
We don’t get snow in Mzansi over the festive season, but we dream along with the crooner anyway. Reading the title makes the song play in your head. Originally released in 1957 and playlisted over Christmas ever since, nobody seems to get tired of this sticky tune.
You can’t escape this song. It’s in movies, it’s been covered by several artists, and it’s always playing on someone’s PA system. The song was initially released in 1970 and has been a constant feature on festive track selections.
Finally, Eartha Kitt helped the festive season along in 1953 with a flirty and sexy wish list. Madonna remade it for A Very Special Christmas’s charity record in the ’80s. Both versions are playful and camp as anything, but a welcome break from other Christmas cheese.
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