This Christmas

 

This Christmas single artwork

Every December, I pull out a chart and just stare at it for a while.

It's the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, week of January 5, 2013. Rod Stewart is at number one. And there at number 24 — its peak, in its fourth week on the chart — is "This Christmas." Mine. Written with my friend Harry Hess.

Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, week of January 5, 2013

I want you to understand what that felt like. This is an independent release. No major label, no big promo machine — just a song Harry and I believed in, worked by people who believed in it. And there it is, sitting on the same chart as Paul McCartney. Michael Bublé. Adele. Taylor Swift. Maroon 5. Train. Kelly Clarkson.

You dream about that as a kid in Sault Ste. Marie, but you don't really expect to see your name typed out between those names. I still haven't gotten over it.

Harry and I wrote it to be a classic — the kind of Christmas song that doesn't sound like it was made in any particular year, the kind you could imagine hearing ten, twenty years later next to the standards. That was the whole ambition. And the funny thing is, that's exactly what happened.

Thirteen years later, "This Christmas" still goes to work every December. This very morning, a radio station in Germany wrote to ask for the MP3. It's playing in Alaska. A station in Ireland tells me they play it every single season. It's in rotation in France. All told, the song has now been played in 27 countries — Switzerland, Canada, Norway, Belgium, Finland, France, Croatia, the United States, Lithuania, Malta, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Turkey, Australia, Italy, the United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, South Africa, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ireland, Antigua and Barbuda, Cyprus, Estonia, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. A song Harry and I wrote in a room together is now part of strangers' Christmases all over the world.

That's the thing nobody tells you about a chart position. Number 24 was the thrill — don't get me wrong, I'll never forget it. But the real gift was what came after: the song left home and made a life of its own.

Merry Christmas, everybody. However you celebrate it — I hope this one's part of it.

— Franklin


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