There can be few better feelings than being at a Christmas party with your closest friends, gathered around a candle-lit table, Christmas crowns on heads, bellies full of turkey. And then Wham’s immaculate 80s classic ‘Last Christmas’ starts to play, and you can’t help but scream your heart out.

As a mid-July ‘Last Christmas’ listener and a massive George Michael fan, I have felt so much delight seeing ‘Last Christmas’ return to the Christmas charts, clinching the number one spot in both 2023 and 2024, 40 years after it narrowly missed out in 1984. Nevertheless, this remarkable comeback seems to indicate a dramatic shift in the way music is consumed.

When ‘Last Christmas’ was first released, recharting was a rare phenomenon coinciding with anniversary re-releases, or a feature in a movie soundtrack. Now, it is considerably more common. This year, six of the songs that charted in the Christmas top ten were released in another year. In comparison, in 1984 only one song was not released the same year and that had only debuted in 1983.

“Festive songs understandably seem to recur more as we associate our long-held Christmas traditions and memories with a relatively small group of classic songs”

Historically, the place of the Christmas number one as a pinnacle of musical achievement meant many different types of songs vied for it. Many were brand new Christmas songs like ‘Last Christmas’ and ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’. Others were charity songs, most famously Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas?’, which narrowly beat Wham’s effort to the number one spot.

Some artists sought to showcase their popularity by attaining the accolade of Christmas number one, despite not releasing explicitly ‘Christmassy’ songs. The Spice Girls, for example, had three consecutive Christmas number ones, while X Factor winners topped the charts consecutively from 2005-2008. However, these artists were sometimes humbled in their pursuit of the number one spot by joke entries like ‘Mr Blobby’, or the successful campaign to make Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ Christmas number one in protest of Simon Cowell’s domination of the charts.

Yet our consumption of older Christmas music appears to have accelerated; festive songs understandably seem to recur more as we associate our long-held Christmas traditions and memories with a relatively small group of classic songs. However, it might not immediately signal a revolution in how festive music is enjoyed, as Christmas charts are not exclusively dominated by legacy songs. Charity songs still perform well; the Youtubers LadBaby held the number one spot five years in a row, raising £305,000 for the Trussell Trust.

Of course, charts were once collated based on average sales from record shops and each person’s interaction with a song was only counted; a stark contrast to today, where composition of the charts is heavily reliant on streaming, and each individual listen is recorded. Nevertheless, we should not dismiss the resurgence of classic Christmas songs as a quirk of a changed system. Streaming became part of UK charts in 2014, yet the following Christmas every song in the top ten was released that year, so the shift must be more recent.

“Given the unpredictability of our lives and the chaos of the world around us, our nostalgia for past hits comforts us”

While the race for Christmas number one is fairly light-hearted, these changes indicate a deeper change in our listening habits. Nostalgia has recently become a more significant aspect of our listening, think of the renewed appreciation for Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ from the Stranger Things soundtrack, or the continued affection for 90s Britpop. Given the unpredictability of our lives and the chaos of the world around us, our nostalgia for past hits comforts us – just as those older Christmas tunes bring us back to that childhood bliss.

Perhaps the limitless potential of social media trends has also fragmented our culture and made it harder for any one new Christmas song to get enough people to coalesce around it. Songs like ‘Last Christmas’ predate this fragmentation and thus appeal more broadly across tastes and generations. Ironically, the charts themselves have become a victim of the shifting sands of the media landscape they try to capture. They are undeniably less relevant than in the 70s and 80s when Top of the Pops regularly attained weekly viewing figures of 15 million.

There is something liberating in the way in which music is becoming less monolithic and more individual. These Christmas classics bring us so much comfort and joy, but should we think more about why we struggle to find new music that everyone can share? Or are we doomed to be forever listening to the ghosts of Christmas Last?