Goodman and Whitfield created precisely the same sort of mess.Īfter the wretched “Baby’s First Christmas,” the proceedings took a more positive turn with the Beach Boys’ “Little Saint Nick” and Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Paper,” only to crash to a halt again with Stan Freberg’s “Christmas Dragnet.” … The first hour ended with the Chipmunks version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” And thus another big problem with the show is revealed: specifically, too many Chipmunks records (three in all, counting “The Happy Reindeer”), and generally, too much novelty crap. “The Happy Reindeer,” a Chipmunks record in all but name with the same speeded-up voices, created an epic train wreck alongside the Williams record, which runs something like five minutes and seems twice as long.
But the six records that followed Elvis represented as horrid a stretch as any in AT40 history: “Santa Claus Is Watching You” by Ray Stevens, “The Happy Reindeer” by Dancer, Prancer, and Nervous, “Little Altar Boy” by Andy Williams, Dickie Goodman’s “Santa and the Satellite,” “Santo Natale” by David Whitfield, and “Baby’s First Christmas” by Connie Francis. It started off reasonably enough, with “If Every Day Was Like Christmas” by Elvis. I wrote about the show several years ago, and some of that post follows, with a couple of added notes and hyperlinks. Fifty years ago, on Christmas weekend, American Top 40 aired a countdown of the Top 40 Christmas hits of all time.