Songfacts®:

• This perennially popular Christmas tune was originally recorded by Chris Rea in 1986, peaking at #53 on the UK single chart two years later. Since 2007, the song has re-entered the UK Top 75 each year around Christmas time and has charted in several other European countries as well.
• Rea wrote the song many years before he first recorded it. The idea came to him when he was stuck in heavy traffic heading out of London in his wife's Austin Mini with the prospect of a long drive to his home town of Middlesbrough ahead. He told BBC Radio 4's Today program, "Driving Home for Christmas" is a "car version of a carol."
• The song was used in Christmas commercials for frozen food retail chain Iceland in 1997, 1998, and 2011 respectively, with the latter featuring a cover by singer and TV presenter Stacey Solomon. Her version was released as a single peaking at #27 in the UK. All the proceeds went to Alzheimer's Research UK and children's hospice charity Together For Short Lives.
• Being stuck in traffic has proved to be a fruitful experience for Chris Rea. Another of his most successful songs, "The Road To Hell (Part Two)," was written by the singer while caught up in a jam on the M25.
• Chris Rea wrote "Driving Home for Christmas" with his longtime keyboard player Max Middleton. The melody was loosely inspired by "A Walk in the Black Forest," an easy-listening instrumental by German pianist Horst Jankowski.
• Rea and Max Middleton originally envisioned it as a song for someone else. "Me and Max thought we'd try to get it to Van Morrison, as we thought it'd be his kind of thing," Rea recalled to The Daily Express.
  
  That's why it was written in a key Morrison could sing, not Rea. "We only recorded it ourselves just to hear what it would sound like," he said.
  
  Morrison never bit, if he ever even heard about it. Rea has since said he's not convinced the Irish singer ever got the demo.
• Rea first wrote the song in 1978, but it sat unreleased for eight years. "Someone at my record label, Magnet, put it on the B-side of my single 'Hello Friend,'" he said. "Then a DJ picked up on it and started playing it instead of 'Hello Friend', and I still don't know how or why they did that."
  
  Only then did Rea realize the song had legs.
• Rea re-recorded "Driving Home for Christmas" and released it as a single in 1988, when it peaked at a modest #53 in the UK. The song didn't crack the Top 40 until 2007, when it reached #33, and it gained a new audience after appearing in the 2008 Gavin & Stacey Christmas special.
  
  Its real second life came decades later: during the UK's COVID-era Christmas restrictions in 2020, the song surged online and climbed to #11. In 2021, 43 years after it was written, it finally reached the UK Top 10 for the first time.
• Rea described "Driving Home for Christmas" as emotionally conflicted but ultimately reassuring. "It's a frustrating song, but it's also hopeful and comforting," he told the Daily Express. "It's funny, because I'd just been banned from driving when I wrote it. But I was feeling good at the time too, and people say they can hear that infectious feel-good mood."
  
  As for its enduring realism, Rea added: "I still sing it at other drivers when I'm stuck on the motorway."