Song #7: "Santa Tell Me" by Ariana Grande

 

Song #7: Ariana Grande — “Santa Tell Me”

Today’s Song

Ariana Grande — “Santa Tell Me”
Released: November 24, 2014
First Hot 100 appearance: December 2014
First Top-20 appearance: January 2021
Peak: #5
Project era: 2020–present
My score: 66/100

Era-assignment note: Although “Santa Tell Me” was released and first charted in 2014, it peaked at only #42 during its original Hot 100 run. It did not reach the Top 20 until the 2020–21 holiday season. Under this project's eligibility rules, that makes it a 2020–present selection.

Chart performance

• Billboard Hot 100: #5

• Original 2014–15 peak: #42

• Weeks charted: 36

• Weeks Top 20: 21

• Weeks Top 10: 6

• Weeks at peak: 4

• UK Singles Chart: #8

• Billboard Holiday 100: #1

Ariana Grande at this point

• Charting record: 12th of 110

• Top-20 hit: 25th of 34

• Top-10 hit: 23rd of 25

• #1 pop hit: N/A — “Santa Tell Me” never reached #1

• Previous Top-20: “34+35”

• Next Top-20: The Weeknd & Ariana Grande — “Save Your Tears”

The chronology here is unusual. For total charting records, “Santa Tell Me” belongs with Ariana Grande's 2014 releases because that's when it first entered the Hot 100. For Top-20 chronology, it belongs in 2021, when it finally crossed that threshold. Its peak is the highest position it ultimately reached: #5.

Retrospective standing

• GOAT overall: #4,051

• Among Ariana Grande songs: #14 of 110

• Among Ariana Grande Top-20 hits: #14 of 34

• GOAT points: 246,807

• Hot 100 chart history: #5 peak, 36 weeks

Record details

• Songwriters: Ariana Grande, Savan Kotecha, Ilya Salmanzadeh

• Producer: Ilya Salmanzadeh

• Lead vocal: Ariana Grande

• Running time: 3:24

• Label: Republic

• Recording: Original 2014 recording

• Original or cover: Original

• Official music video: Yes

One other name buried in the credits is worth remembering: Max Martin. He isn't the producer of “Santa Tell Me”—that credit belongs to Ilya Salmanzadeh—but Martin contributed to the recording arrangement and programming. We'll put a pin in that name, because I suspect he's going to come up again in this project. A lot.

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A Christmas song in August

I knew this song very well before today.

For years, I've listened to the entire Top 40 every week, which means I've become intimately familiar with the annual Christmas invasion of the charts. Starting sometime around Thanksgiving, the same group of Christmas songs begins flooding back into the Hot 100.

Most of them are old. Really old.

There are recordings from the pre-rock era, followed by that enormous collection of Christmas records from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Then there are a few somewhat newer standards, most notably Wham!'s “Last Christmas” from 1984 and Mariah Carey's “All I Want for Christmas Is You” from 1994.

And then there is Ariana Grande's “Santa Tell Me.”

It has always stuck out to me precisely because it isn't some old chestnut from 60 years ago. It's a modern pop record sitting among songs that have been Christmas standards for generations.

More interestingly, I've noticed it getting bigger.

I wasn't imagining that.

Watching a Christmas standard being born

“Santa Tell Me” had a surprisingly modest beginning. It was released in November 2014, entered the Hot 100 and peaked at only #42.

Then it disappeared from the Hot 100.

Not for a few months. For years.

It didn't return until the 2020 Christmas season. And when it did, something interesting started happening.

Its seasonal peaks tell the story:

2014–15: #42
2015–19: Did not make the Hot 100
2020–21: #17
2021–22: #18
2022–23: #12
2023–24: #11
2024–25: #5
2025–26: #5

That's a very strange career for a pop record.

Normally, a song becomes a hit, reaches its peak, falls down the chart and disappears. Five years after it leaves the Hot 100, its commercial life is over.

Christmas records apparently don't have to obey that rule.

They get another audition every year.

“Santa Tell Me” seems to have gradually accumulated enough familiarity that people started thinking of it not as an Ariana Grande Christmas single, but simply as one of the songs you play at Christmas.

I've been thinking of that as reaching “exit velocity.”

Most new Christmas songs never get there.

Why this one?

This question sent me down a rabbit hole.

There have been plenty of attempts by major contemporary artists to create new Christmas standards. Justin Bieber released “Mistletoe.” Kelly Clarkson released “Underneath the Tree.” Taylor Swift released “Christmas Tree Farm.” The Jonas Brothers released “Like It's Christmas.”

Being a gigantic pop star clearly isn't sufficient. Taylor Swift is arguably an even bigger star than Ariana Grande, yet “Christmas Tree Farm” barely makes an impression on the Hot 100 each Christmas.

So why did this one escape?

I remembered hearing a podcast about exactly this question and eventually tracked it down: a 2021 episode of Switched on Pop called “Why do new Christmas songs fail?”

The premise was almost exactly the question I'd been asking. Which, if any, of these newer Christmas songs might actually escape the normal life cycle of a pop single and become part of the permanent Christmas canon?

They weren't particularly enthusiastic about Justin Bieber's “Mistletoe,” dismissing it as “bro music” and finding it too derivative of the laid-back acoustic style associated with Jason Mraz. They liked the Jonas Brothers' “Like It's Christmas,” although they didn't spend as much time digging into it.

They also correctly identified Kelly Clarkson's “Underneath the Tree” as a strong candidate for long-term survival.

But the most interesting part for today's purposes was their discussion of “Santa Tell Me.”

Charlie Harding was particularly struck by the song's use of strings. They aren't merely there to provide generic Christmas decoration; they're part of a musical vocabulary that connects the record with older Christmas music while the rest of the production remains recognizably contemporary.

Musicologist Nate Sloan ultimately picked “Santa Tell Me” as the song most likely to join the Christmas canon, because of that broader mixture of old-school Christmas ideas and modern production.

That episode came out in 2021.

Five Christmas seasons later, “Santa Tell Me” has reached #5.

Good call.

A love song with sleigh bells

Listening deliberately today, my first thought was that “Santa Tell Me” isn't really about Christmas.

It's a love song with sleigh bells.

There are chimes at the beginning and Christmas sounds throughout the production. The lyrics contain Santa, mistletoe, Christmas Day and all the other things necessary to establish the setting.

But the actual story is about something much more universal.

Ariana really likes a guy.

She'd like to fall for him, and she seems genuinely excited about the possibility that this could turn into something. But she's been hurt before and doesn't want to emotionally invest herself if he's just going to disappear.

That's an extremely familiar feeling at the beginning of a relationship: I really like this person. I hope this works. But liking them this much also gives them the opportunity to hurt me.

Christmas provides the hook.

And it's actually a pretty clever one.

Ariana isn't asking Santa to bring her the boy for Christmas. She's treating Santa as some kind of omniscient relationship adviser.

Santa supposedly knows who's naughty and nice. So Ariana essentially asks him to perform a background check on her prospective boyfriend.

Is this guy serious? Is he going to stick around? Can I safely fall for him?

It's a little ridiculous when described literally, but it works perfectly well as a pop-song conceit.

More importantly, the song doesn't feel suspicious or cynical. It feels hopeful. Ariana clearly wants Santa's answer to be yes. She likes this guy and wants the relationship to work.

That's a nice emotion to attach to Christmas.

And maybe that's one reason it works. The underlying feeling isn't dependent upon Christmas at all. Most people have experienced some version of that mixture of excitement and vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song takes something universal, puts it against a holiday background, and uses Santa as the unusual hook.

The modern Christmas-song problem

That still doesn't entirely answer the question.

“Santa Tell Me” has a relatable romantic premise, unmistakable Christmas sounds, a strong hook and contemporary production.

Fine.

But why hasn't “Christmas Tree Farm” achieved the same thing?

I'm not sure.

And I don't think we need to solve that today.

If record companies knew the precise formula for creating a Christmas standard, we'd presumably get several new ones every year. Instead, hundreds of Christmas songs are released by famous artists and almost all of them disappear.

Maybe that's part of what makes the Christmas charts fascinating. Every November, this strange little music market reopens. New songs arrive. Old songs return. Some recurrent songs lose ground while others gain it.

And every year listeners effectively vote again on which recordings belong in the Christmas canon.

“Santa Tell Me” appears to be winning that election.

There's even some hope here for the devoted “Christmas Tree Farm” fan. If we'd looked at “Santa Tell Me” several years after its release, when it had been absent from the Hot 100 for years, we might have concluded that it hadn't made the cut either.

Christmas songs get another chance every year.

The Billboard problem

All of this creates a completely separate statistical problem.

I think Billboard is right to allow these songs onto the Hot 100.

If millions of Americans are listening to “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree” during Christmas week, then Billboard's weekly chart should reflect that. Excluding it merely because the recording is old would make the Hot 100 a less accurate description of what people are actually listening to.

The trouble starts when we try to turn those weekly charts into an all-time historical ranking.

Ordinary hits have finite careers. They rise, peak, fall and eventually stop accumulating chart points.

A successful Christmas standard can theoretically accumulate points forever.

At some point, “Santa Tell Me” may become Ariana Grande's highest-ranked song on the GOAT list simply because it gets another four or five weeks to add points every December while all her conventional hits have stopped accumulating them.

Kelly Clarkson's “Underneath the Tree” could eventually do the same thing.

Brenda Lee's “Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree” may effectively already occupy that position in her catalog.

And this isn't entirely a Christmas problem. “Monster Mash” and “Thriller” can receive Halloween boosts. Even something like “Party in the U.S.A.” can benefit to a lesser degree from an annual event.

The popularity is real. The historical comparison is the difficult part.

Ironically, some Christmas standards may actually still be undervalued historically because Billboard excluded recurrent recordings from the Hot 100 for long stretches of time. So it's possible for recurrent songs to have been disadvantaged by the methodology in the past while simultaneously possessing an enormous mathematical advantage going forward.

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe eventually we need separate cumulative and best-chart-run rankings.

Although that creates its own absurdity. A chart-run GOAT playlist might eventually contain:

“Santa Tell Me” — 2024 run
“Santa Tell Me” — 2025 run
“Santa Tell Me” — 2026 run

Same recording. Three times.

I'll let the Billboard executives who are undoubtedly reading this figure that one out.

How it was made

The creation of the song turns out to be surprisingly straightforward.

Songwriter Savan Kotecha has said that he came up with the chorus while taking a shower in Los Angeles—in July. He recorded the idea and sent it to Ilya Salmanzadeh in Sweden. Ilya sent chords back, Kotecha developed the verse melodies, and Ariana eventually joined them to finish the song.

The whole process apparently took only a few days.

And they really were deliberately trying to write a Christmas song for Ariana Grande. This wasn't an unrelated love song that somebody subsequently decorated with sleigh bells.

Even more interestingly, Kotecha recalled that Ilya thought they might have created one of the great modern Christmas songs. Years later, Kotecha was watching the song's Spotify numbers increase every Christmas.

The people who made the record were apparently watching the same thing I've been noticing on the Hot 100.

The production also helps explain some of what I heard today. Along with the obvious chimes and sleigh bells, the recording incorporates strings and background vocals into a contemporary pop/R&B production.

And apparently people really do want to keep hearing it. “Santa Tell Me” has accumulated more than 1.5 billion Spotify streams, an extraordinary number for a recording whose consumption is overwhelmingly concentrated into a small portion of every year.

The video

I'd somehow managed to hear “Santa Tell Me” dozens of times without ever watching its official video.

So I watched it today.

It's fine.

It didn't materially change my understanding of the song. It's playful, contemporary and very obviously Christmas-themed.

There is also a surprising amount of ass-shaking for a Christmas song.

Then again, if part of the record's appeal is combining traditional Christmas elements with contemporary pop, perhaps a very 2014 Ariana Grande Christmas video is exactly what you'd expect.

Final verdict

After spending considerably more time thinking about “Santa Tell Me” than I ever expected to spend thinking about “Santa Tell Me,” I basically agree with Nate Sloan.

It's a pretty effective mixture of traditional Christmas tropes, modern production and an interesting angle on the Christmas love song.

I understand why people like it.

I understand why it keeps coming back.

I'm still not entirely sure why this song reached exit velocity while dozens of seemingly similar songs haven't. That's a question for another day.

As for the actual record, I think it's above average. It probably wouldn't make my personal Top 5 Christmas songs. I'm not going to seek it out in August after writing this, but when it inevitably turns up again around Thanksgiving, I'm certainly not changing the channel.

I've spent the last five or six years watching “Santa Tell Me” slowly become a Christmas standard without really stopping to think about what I was watching.

Turns out that's considerably more interesting than I realized.

66/100