All I want for Christmas is a different song

Grammy-award-winning producer and songwriter Walter Afanasieff's many successes run the gamut from some of the best-loved Disney film numbers such as A Whole New World (Aladdin) to Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On (Titanic). However, he's best known for his decade-long collaborative association with Mariah Carey. Twenty years ago the pair created her best-selling single All I Want For Christmas Is You. This ebullient tune was, arguably, also the last song to join the canon of great Christmas classics, the elite club of hardy perennials that are wheeled out every year. Nothing since has quite made the grade.

"[The song] is so simple that at the time I thought it was overly simple and I really didn't like it," Afanasieff recently admitted. "The genius ... is she created a lyric that, to this day, is the only uptempo Christmas love song I even know about. Anybody can sing it to anybody and it can only mean one thing."

This musical formula alone, however potent, can surely not be the sole reason for the song's multi-million-selling reach. But where are its successors? Where can we hear the next tranche of seasonal gems?

The golden era of Christmas singles was undoubtedly the 70s, a decade so glittery and spangled, at least when viewed via TV nostalgia shows, that it appears to have been one long Christmas Day in flares. As 60s counterculture faded, and prior to the advent of punk, there was a window wherein pop cosied up to the entertainment industry. Seasonal froth was as welcome as any other sort, thus a deluge of Yuletide fare appeared from Slade, Wizzard, Mud, Greg Lake, The Wombles, Shakin' Stevens and multiple others.

Since then occasional Christmas staples have emerged: Wham's Last Christmas, Cliff Richard's Mistletoe and Wine, Jona Lewie's Stop the Cavalry, and so on, songs that earn their writers substantial royalties each year, via their use everywhere from radio to shopping malls and as novelty toys. It can take time, though, for a song to be fully embraced. For instance, the Pogues' Fairtytale of New York, released in November 1987, has become one of the most critically acclaimed of all, but for a long time it was regarded as a slightly edgy, alternative Christmas song.

However, this idea of a "bedding-in period" does not explain the dearth of widely popular new festive fare. There has been some great new Christmas music over the past couple of decades but it hasn't received mass acceptance, building slowly, steadily year on year, in the traditional fashion. For one thing, the media has fragmented since the millennium. There are no focal points akin to Top of the Pops, or other seasonal "event" TV and radio.

A rising generation consumes music with unprecedented geographical and historical access and no necessity to join in what others are up to. They can poke about on iTunes and YouTube, checking the latest Yuletide parodies and scene-specific fare without signing up to any bandwagon.

Cynicism at the ever-rising tide of commercialism surrounding Christmas does not help the cause of the Christmas single. Nor can the mass embrace of irony that's the default setting of so many modern music consumers.