Holiday Music

Andrea Bocelli Made a Christmas Album With His Children

Virginia Bocelli was ten years old when she took a solo on her father’s Christmas album. The track is When Christmas Comes To Town, from The Polar Express, and it sits on a Decca release alongside her brother Matteo, then twenty-four, who sings I’ll Be Home For Christmas alone.

A Family Christmas came out on 22 October 2022, produced by Stephan Moccio, and was the first record Andrea Bocelli had made with his children. Thirteen tracks move between English and Italian and between solos, duets and trios, and it went on to be the best-selling Christmas album of that year.

What Is Actually on It

The repertoire is standard by design: Do You Hear What I Hear?, Feliz Navidad, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, Joy To The World, Happy Xmas (War Is Over), and, less predictably, Over The Rainbow.

The inclusion of a song from The Wizard of Oz on a Christmas record is the kind of decision that only makes sense in a family context, where the selection is governed by what three people can sing together rather than by what belongs in a carol service. The same logic explains giving the ten-year-old a solo from a children’s film.

Moccio is a considered choice of producer. He is best known for co-writing Wrecking Ball and Earned It, which is a long way from Tuscan tenor repertoire, and the result is a record that sits closer to contemporary pop production than Bocelli’s classical work does.

How It Performed

It reached number one in Ireland in the week of 23 December 2022 and twenty-two on the Billboard 200, where it spent five weeks across that December and the following January. Those are not spectacular chart positions, and they still made it the year’s best-selling Christmas album, which says something about how thinly that market is spread across a very large number of releases.

A thirty-seven-minute documentary film accompanied it, shot at Castel Savoia in Italy. A Disney+ short with The Simpsons followed on 15 December 2022, and the 2023 deluxe edition expanded the album to twenty-two tracks with nine additions, including that Simpsons collaboration and one with Pentatonix.

Recording with Pentatonix, who now book twenty-eight arenas for six weeks of Christmas every year, is a fairly precise indication of which market the deluxe edition was aimed at. The two acts occupy the same December territory from opposite ends: one an a cappella group built entirely for the season, the other an opera tenor who visits it.

Putting a Child on a Major Label Album

Giving a ten-year-old a solo track on a Decca release is a decision worth examining, because the obvious version of it would be indefensible. A child’s voice on a commercial record is usually either a novelty or a liability, and the industry has a poor history in both directions.

What makes it work here is the choice of song. When Christmas Comes To Town was written to be sung by a child in an animated film; it sits in a comfortable range and asks for nothing a young singer cannot deliver honestly. Nobody is being asked to perform beyond their means, which is the difference between including a child and exploiting one.

Matteo’s position is entirely different. He was twenty-four, already recording under his own name, and a solo on his father’s album functions as a professional credit rather than a family cameo. The album therefore does two separate things at once: it introduces one child and it platforms another.

Where He Came From

Bocelli was born in Lajatico in Tuscany in 1958 with congenital glaucoma, and lost his sight completely at twelve after being hit in the eye during a football match. He began piano at six and went on to learn flute, saxophone, trumpet, trombone, guitar and drums.

He studied law at Pisa and briefly worked as a court-appointed lawyer, singing in piano bars in the evenings for money. The break came in 1994 when he won the newcomers’ section at Sanremo, followed in 1996 by Time to Say Goodbye with Sarah Brightman.

Romanza arrived in 1997 and became one of the best-selling albums ever made. He has since sold more than ninety million records, and Sacred Arias is the biggest-selling classical album by any solo artist. Sì, in 2019, went to number one in both Britain and the United States.

Thirty Years of Romanza

The current tour marks that album’s thirtieth anniversary and is unusually long. It opened in North America in February 2026 with Columbus, Hollywood in Florida, Tampa, Raleigh, Birmingham, Nashville and Chicago, the Nashville date shared with Michael W. Smith and Lauren Daigle.

European summer dates take in Piazza San Marco in Venice in June, Gdansk and the PGE Narodowy in Warsaw in August, and the Ernst-Happel-Stadion in Vienna. A second American leg in September runs from Seattle down the west coast to two nights at the Hollywood Bowl and two at Red Rocks.

Then, in December, the tour becomes a Christmas run in all but name: Boston on the tenth, Buffalo, Montreal, two nights at Madison Square Garden on the sixteenth and seventeenth, Hamilton, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on the twenty-second.

He also sang at the opening ceremony of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics at the San Siro on 6 February, which is the kind of booking that follows from having spent three decades as the most recognisable classical voice in the world.

The venue mix across the year is the interesting part. Piazza San Marco and Red Rocks are open-air spaces chosen for their setting; the United Center and Madison Square Garden are chosen for capacity; the Hollywood Bowl manages both. Very few artists can move between a Venetian square and an American ice-hockey arena within a single tour without one of them feeling wrong, and the reason he can is that the show travels with an orchestra rather than a band.

The December Business

Eight arena dates in the twelve days before Christmas is a deliberate structure, and it explains why a family Christmas album made sense commercially as well as personally. An artist who can fill Madison Square Garden twice in December has an annual seasonal audience whether or not he has a seasonal record, and having one converts that audience into sales.

It is the inverse of how the format usually works. Mariah Carey’s Christmas record created her December; Bocelli already had one and made the album to serve it. The children were presumably not a commercial calculation, but putting them on it is what gave the project a reason to exist beyond the calendar.

It also solves a succession problem that most classical crossover artists never address. A voice like his has a finite working life, and the audience that fills arenas in December has been following him for thirty years. Recording an album that introduces the next generation of the family, rather than simply announcing them separately, hands that audience over rather than hoping it transfers.

Whether it works is a question for the next decade. What is already clear is that a record made in a Tuscan castle with a ten-year-old singing a song from a Christmas film outsold every other holiday album released that year, which is not the outcome anybody would have predicted from the description.

By Will Lisil / August 29, 2026

Article Featured Holiday Music Music News

Mariah Carey Waited Twenty-Five Years for a Number One

When All I Want for Christmas Is You came out on 29 October 1994, it could not enter the Billboard Hot 100. The chart at that time required a commercially available physical single, and Columbia did not release one. The biggest holiday record of the modern era was, by the rules then in force, ineligible.

It first appeared on the Hot 100 in January 2000, at number eighty-three. It reached number one on 21 December 2019, twenty-five years after release, which is the longest climb to the top the chart has ever recorded.

Twenty-Two Weeks at Number One

Since then it has returned every December. It topped the chart in every holiday season from 2019 to 2025 and has accumulated twenty-two weeks at number one as of January 2026, more than any other record in the history of the Hot 100. It is also the first song to reach number one across five separate chart runs.

The British trajectory was slower still. It spent seventy weeks in the top forty before finally reaching number one on 11 December 2020, twenty-six years after release, which is a UK record of its own. It first topped the Australian chart in December 2018 and the Canadian one in January 2019, having originally peaked at two in Australia.

On Billboard’s Holiday 100, which launched in 2011, it has spent seventy-one of the chart’s seventy-nine cumulative weeks at number one. In November 2021 it was formally ranked the greatest Holiday 100 song of all time. It also holds the longest run at number one in both Germany and Austria, at twenty-two and nineteen weeks respectively, and has topped charts in more than thirty countries.

What Changed Was the Rules

None of this reflects a change in the song. What changed was how charts count.

The physical-single requirement disappeared, download sales were incorporated, and then streaming was added and weighted. A record that is played enormously for six weeks a year but bought by almost nobody was invisible under the old system and dominant under the new one. The song did not climb to number one so much as the measurement finally caught up with the listening.

That makes it an unusually clean case study. Almost every other chart record is entangled with promotion, radio and release strategy. This one is a straightforward demonstration that the Hot 100 measures whatever it has decided to measure.

Recorded in August

Mariah Carey and Walter Afanasieff wrote and produced it, recording at The Hit Factory in New York in August 1994. Carey has described the session as amazing and unlike any other, and has said she is a festive person who has sung Christmas songs since she was a child.

Her brief for the album was practical: a balance between standard Christian hymns and fun songs, with at least a few new ones. Merry Christmas duly mixes Silent Night, O Holy Night, Joy to the World and Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town with three originals, including Miss You Most (At Christmas Time) and Jesus Born on This Day, and pushes the arrangements toward soul and gospel rather than orchestral pop.

The reviews at the time were mixed. Jon Pareles objected to what he heard as narcissistic vocal display; Steve Morse thought it might be her best record and praised her cutting loose with unbridled soul.

Why the Song Itself Works

Chart mechanics explain the number one; they do not explain why anybody wanted to hear it two billion times. The construction does.

It runs on a wall-of-sound arrangement descended from Phil Spector’s Christmas records, with sleigh bells, piano triplets and layered backing vocals arriving in the first few seconds, which means the song identifies itself almost instantly. That matters enormously for seasonal music, where most listening happens in the background and a track has a second or two to register.

The lyric does something rarer. Almost every Christmas standard is about the occasion itself: snow, bells, home, family, a saint. This one uses the season only as a setting and spends its whole length rejecting all of it in favour of one person. That is closer to a pop love song than to a carol, which is why it works in contexts where Silent Night would not.

The vocal is also, deliberately, not the hardest thing Carey has ever sung. She is known for a five-octave range and the whistle register, and neither is the point here; the melody sits in a range most people can attempt, which is a significant part of why the record gets sung along to rather than merely played.

The Numbers Underneath

The album has sold eighteen million copies, the most of any holiday record by a female artist, and Billboard describes it as the most successful Christmas album of all time. It is certified diamond in the United States and sold 2.8 million copies in Japan alone, where it went to number one.

The song itself is eighteen times platinum in America, having become the first holiday record certified diamond in December 2021, and ten times platinum in the United Kingdom, where it is the highest-certified song by any female artist. It has sold over sixteen million copies, passed two billion Spotify streams, and in December 2022 became the first song to exceed twenty million streams there in a single day.

The Associated Press estimated its royalty earnings at around a hundred million dollars as of 2023. In the same year the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Why Nobody Has Repeated It

Carey is credited with changing what a Christmas album is for. Before Merry Christmas, the form was largely a late-career exercise for established singers; she made one at twenty-five, at the commercial peak of her run, and demonstrated that it could be a serious release rather than a contractual filler.

Every young artist who has since made a holiday record is working inside that precedent, and none has produced anything approaching the same result. The reason is partly that the canon has room for very few additions. The New Yorker called it one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon, and the Guardian ranked it first among fifty Christmas songs while noting that it is a rare modern Christmas song that has become a standard.

The wider career context makes the point sharper. Carey has nineteen number ones on the Hot 100, more than any other solo artist, eighteen of them as a songwriter, and has spent a record hundred and one weeks at the top. Twenty-two of those weeks come from one song she wrote in her twenties about wanting nothing except a person.

The First of November

She now posts a video every 1 November marking the start of the season, which has itself become an annual news event. It is a small piece of scheduling that formalises what the charts already show: for six weeks a year this record is unavoidable, and for the other forty-six it is not.

That is precisely the arrangement Michael Bublé built into a sixteen-million-selling album two decades later, and his version of it includes a cover of this very song. The difference is that his record was designed for the seasonal cycle from the start. Hers created it, without anybody involved intending to.

By Will Lisil / August 28, 2026

Article Featured Holiday Music Music News

Michael Bublé’s Christmas Album Keeps Returning to the Charts

In the first week of January 2012, Michael Bublé’s Christmas fell from number one on the Billboard 200 to number twenty-four. That remains the sixth-largest single-week drop from the top of that chart, and the explanation requires no analysis at all.

It is also the most instructive fact about the record. An album that can occupy the top of the American chart for five weeks and then become almost unsellable overnight is operating on a completely different commercial logic from everything around it, and fourteen years later it is still doing so.

Twenty Countries at Number One

Released in late October 2011 through 143 Records and Reprise, produced by David Foster, Bob Rock and Humberto Gatica, it went to number one in twenty countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Croatia and New Zealand among them.

In the United States it was the second best-selling album of 2011 on 2,452,000 copies, behind only Adele’s 21. Worldwide sales have passed sixteen million.

The certifications describe an unusually even global spread rather than one dominant market: six times platinum in the United States, eleven times platinum in the United Kingdom, diamond in Canada, double diamond in Australia, fourteen times platinum in New Zealand and eight times platinum in Italy. It is the best-selling holiday album Britain has ever had.

Six Separate Decembers at Number One in Australia

The recurrence is the part with no real precedent. It topped the ARIA albums chart in December 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019, making it the first album to reach number one there on six separate occasions.

In Britain it became the first seasonal album to place inside the top ten in three consecutive years. It has re-entered charts every year from release through to 2024, and it finished the 2010s at number two on Australia’s decade-end chart, five in the United Kingdom and twenty-four in the United States. On the all-time American holiday albums chart it sits at number two.

An album that sells for six weeks a year for fourteen years accumulates figures that annual releases cannot match, and it does so without any of the promotional spending a new record requires.

Sixteen Tracks, One New Song

The construction is conservative by design. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas opens, followed by Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, Jingle Bells with The Puppini Sisters, White Christmas as a duet with Shania Twain, and versions of All I Want for Christmas Is You, A Holly Jolly Christmas, Santa Baby, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), Silent Night, Blue Christmas, I’ll Be Home for Christmas and Ave Maria.

Thalía joins for Mis Deseos and Feliz Navidad. A hidden track carries a spoken greeting. Only one song, Cold December Night, is new.

Fifteen standards and one original is a precise ratio. A holiday album succeeds by being familiar, and the single new song exists so the record has something of its own rather than to carry the release. Later editions added Winter Wonderland, Frosty the Snowman, Silver Bells with Naturally 7, and eventually a seven-track bonus disc for the tenth anniversary in 2021.

The one genuinely contentious decision was rewriting Santa Baby’s pronouns for a male singer, which produced Santa buddy, Santa pally and an instruction to wait up that has been widely mocked ever since.

Why This One and Not Another

Dozens of singers with comparable voices have made Christmas albums, and almost all of them sell for one season and disappear. The reasons this one persisted are mostly structural rather than musical.

The first is timing. It arrived in 2011, at the point where streaming was beginning to make seasonal playlists automatic, so an album already positioned as the default benefited from a distribution mechanism that had not existed for earlier Christmas records. The second is the production team: David Foster and Humberto Gatica had spent decades making exactly this kind of large, warm, orchestral pop, and the record sounds expensive in a way that survives repeated exposure.

The third is the least discussed. A Christmas album has to work as background. It is played in kitchens and shops and cars by people who are not listening to it, and anything demanding or idiosyncratic fails at that job. The relentless conservatism of the arrangements, which would be a criticism of any other record, is the specification being met.

What that produces is an unusual commercial object: an album with almost no critical standing that outsells nearly everything reviewed favourably in the same year, and then does it again annually for over a decade.

He Learned It From Bing Crosby

Bublé was born in Burnaby, British Columbia in 1975, and his interest in this music started at about five, when his family played Bing Crosby’s Christmas album. That is a direct line: the record that shaped him is the one his own record was eventually measured against.

His grandfather, Demetrio Santagà, traded plumbing work for stage time at local nightclubs so his sixteen-year-old grandson could sing. The break came in 2000 at Caroline Mulroney’s wedding, where he performed Mack the Knife and met David Foster, who signed him to 143 Records and later produced the Christmas album.

The Television Half

The album is inseparable from the specials that followed it. NBC broadcast A Michael Bublé Christmas in 2011, a third annual special in 2013 featuring Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige and Queen Latifah, then Christmas in New York in 2014, Christmas in Hollywood in 2015 and Christmas in the City in 2021.

An annual television slot is what turns a seasonal album into an institution. Each broadcast reintroduces the record to an audience that was not shopping for it, which is precisely the mechanism behind those chart re-entries.

What He Does the Rest of the Year

Nine studio albums have sold more than seventy-five million records between them, and he has won five Grammys, all of them for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. His own touring is built around a thirty-six-piece orchestra on tiered staging, and the sixth tour ran to a hundred and fifty-one shows across four years.

He returns to the United Kingdom and Ireland between late June and early July 2026, playing outdoor venues, castles and estates, with a first Maltese date at Ta’ Qali National Park in July. Those are his only British and Irish shows of the year.

Playing castles in July and dominating December is a career shape almost nobody else has. It is a version of the arrangement Pentatonix have built by booking twenty-eight arenas for six weeks of Christmas, with one difference: their touring is the business, while Bublé’s Christmas record does the work whether he tours it or not.

He has also spent the past two years coaching on The Voice, winning with Sofronio Vasquez in his first season and Adam David in his second, which is the modern equivalent of the annual television special: a way of being visible to a large general audience without releasing anything.

All of which points at the same conclusion. The most valuable thing Michael Bublé owns is not a touring operation or a current single but a sixteen-track album of mostly other people’s songs, recorded in 2011, that a substantial part of the world has agreed to treat as furniture for one month a year.

By Will Lisil / August 27, 2026

Article Featured Holiday Music Music News

Pentatonix Booked Twenty-Eight Arenas for Six Weeks of Christmas

The first date is 5 November at the Tacoma Dome. The last is 22 December at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. Between them Pentatonix play twenty-six other arenas, which works out to roughly one show every other night for seven weeks, all of it Christmas music. Tickets went on general sale on 14 August.

Six days before the tour opens, on 30 October, a deluxe edition of Christmas in the City arrives, adding ten songs to the sixteen on the original. That album came out on 24 October 2025 through Republic Records and is the group’s eighth Christmas record. The sequencing of album, then deluxe, then tour is the machinery of a seasonal business that Pentatonix have been building since 2012.

The Route

November runs west to east and back again: Tacoma, then Vancouver’s Rogers Arena, Bozeman, Casper, Lincoln, Milwaukee, Grand Rapids, Louisville, Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Hamilton, Charlottesville and Albany. December opens in Baltimore and works south through Columbia, Greenville, Raleigh, Nashville and Atlanta before turning west via North Little Rock, Bossier City, Austin, Fort Worth, Lubbock, Glendale and San Diego.

Two things stand out in that list. The first is how many mid-sized markets it includes: Casper, Wyoming and Bozeman, Montana are not standard arena-tour stops, and playing them in mid-November suggests an audience that is geographically spread rather than concentrated in major metros. The second is the pairing of Vancouver and Hamilton as the Canadian dates, both listed as firsts.

The density is the other notable feature. Twenty-eight arena shows inside forty-eight days means very few days off, and the run includes stretches of three shows in four nights. For a group whose entire instrumentation is human voices, that schedule is a physical proposition rather than a logistical one. There is no guitar to hide behind on a night when a voice is tired, and no backing band to carry a song, which is why a cappella acts historically toured less than their record sales would suggest they could.

What the Deluxe Adds

The original Christmas in the City runs sixteen tracks and forty-six minutes, opening with a twenty-one-second piece called Snow and closing on a Christmas Classics Medley. In between it moves between originals like Bah Humbug, Christmas Movie and Moody Rudy and standards including Holly Jolly Christmas, Silver Bells and Caroling, Caroling.

The deluxe brings ten more, made up of new material, covers and live recordings from the touring cycle. The lead single, released on 6 August, is a mashup of Get Happy and Happy Days Are Here Again, a pairing with a long history in American entertainment. Kirstin Maldonado has framed it as a tribute to the Christmas music of Hollywood’s golden age and the jazz era, which describes the whole record’s ambitions fairly.

A Big Band Without a Band

Scott Hoying has said the group wanted a big band orchestral sound with no rules, aiming for something “fun and bold and theatrical and camp” built around the idea of Christmas in New York. That is a demanding brief for five voices, one of whom is providing the percussion.

The a cappella constraint is what makes the record interesting rather than what limits it. Reproducing a brass section and a rhythm section vocally forces arrangement decisions that a real orchestra would make invisible, and the reviews picked up on it. The Associated Press’s Maria Sherman included it among the best holiday releases of 2025 and pointed to the group’s vocal athletics; another critic praised the multi-part arrangements, rhythmic precision and stylistic range.

Not Everyone Was Convinced

The reception was not uniform. Eric Saeger at Hippo gave it a B minus, finding the original songs largely unsuccessful while rating the traditional carol covers highly. That split is worth noting because it identifies the actual creative problem with a long-running holiday franchise: the standards are what the audience wants, and writing new Christmas songs that survive alongside them is close to impossible. The canon is effectively closed: most of what gets played every December was written between the 1930s and the 1960s, and the handful of later additions can be counted on two hands.

That is the trap every artist making an eighth holiday record walks into. Fill it with standards and you are competing against definitive recordings; fill it with originals and you are asking an audience to learn new songs during the one month a year they most want familiarity. Christmas in the City splits the difference roughly down the middle, and the reviews split along exactly that line.

Commercially the album performed as a catalogue release rather than an event, reaching twenty-eight on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart and six on Top Holiday Albums. The bigger chart story came from a track rather than the record: the group’s version of I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, built around a Frank Sinatra vocal, reached number one on the Adult Contemporary chart last December.

How They Got Here

Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi and Kirstin Maldonado were schoolmates in Arlington, Texas. Hoying recruited the other two for an audition on NBC’s The Sing-Off, adding Kevin Olusola, found through a video of him beatboxing while playing cello, and a bass vocalist. The five met the day before the audition and won the third season in 2011, taking a cash prize and a recording contract.

Matt Sallee took over bass duties in 2017. Along the way the group won three Grammy Awards: two for arrangement, in 2015 and 2016, and one in 2017 for a version of Jolene recorded with Dolly Parton. They received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in February 2023 and signed to Republic Records in early 2025.

The label move matters more than it looks. Republic is a pop major, and arriving there after more than a decade elsewhere, immediately before an eighth Christmas album and a twenty-eight-date arena run, indicates a group being handled as a year-round commercial asset rather than a seasonal one. Two non-holiday singles this year, Heaven on Earth in February and Sacrifice in July, point the same way.

The Christmas Catalogue Is the Business

Eight Christmas albums in thirteen years, plus compilations, is a genuine body of seasonal work. That’s Christmas to Me in 2014 remains the commercial peak: number two on the Billboard 200, double platinum, the fourth best-selling album in the United States that year at 1.14 million copies, and the highest-charting holiday album by a group since 1962. A Pentatonix Christmas in 2016 eventually reached number one.

Building a career around a season that lasts eight weeks is a strange structure, and it works because the catalogue compounds. Every year the older records return to the charts, and every new one adds to the pool. The tour is the part that cannot be automated, which is presumably why it runs to twenty-eight arenas.

The Donation at Checkout

One detail sits outside the commercial logic. The tour partners with the Save The Music Foundation, a music education nonprofit, with an optional donation offered during ticket purchase. It is a small thing and easy to dismiss as brand alignment, though the fit is closer than most: a group formed by school friends, discovered on a television competition, funding school music programmes.

It also puts them in company with acts making deliberately awkward commercial choices this year, in the way Sturgill Simpson capped his own resale market at face value across a comparable arena run. Pentatonix are working the most commercial season in music and have added a line at the checkout that asks for money to go somewhere else.

By Will Lisil / August 18, 2026