(It’s already re-entered the Hot 100 this year, landing at No. Combining the vibe of a lost track from 1963’s A Christmas Gift for You From Phil Spector with the production of a mid-’90s pop song, the lovelorn open letter helped land the octave-vaulting Carey the unofficial title of “Queen of Christmas.” The single has since become synonymous with the season, and has topped the Holiday 100 for 52 weeks, since the chart began in 2011. Unsurprisingly, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” considered the peak of modern Christmas music, checks all of Bennett’s boxes. Home, romance, family, and the usual trappings of Christmas were also in the lyrical mix, with words like snow, party, and Santa cropping up. Written with a Santa-like wink, Bennett posited that the “ultimate Christmas song” would likely include some variation of his findings: A whopping 95 percent of the surveyed tracks were in a major key, and 90 percent were in the 4/4 time signature that echoes clopping horses and jangling sleigh bells.

In 2017, Berklee musicologist Joe Bennett published a lighthearted study on commonalities in the music and lyrics of Christmas songs.

Happy christmas tree song