Songfacts®:

• This is one of two original songs that Darius Rucker wrote for his Home For The Holidays album. He recalled: "Me, Frank Rogers and Monty Powell wrote this song called 'What God Wants for Christmas,' and that instantly got me in the mood. I mean, it was one of those things that after we wrote it, I thought, 'That's Christmas to me' - I wonder 'What God Wants for Christmas.'"
• Darius Rucker told the story of the song. "Frank (Rogers) and I had gotten with this guy named Steve Lesley years ago when we wrote 'Candy Cane Christmas' which is a secular, cool, great song that we loved," he recalled. "And so we decided we were going to put that on the Christmas record, but we wanted to write a religious song too, and Monte Criswell had this great idea and this great thing he had come up with of 'What God Wants for Christmas.' He was like, 'Let's write this.' I was like, 'Cool. Let's write that.'"
  
  "We sat down and the first thing I did was I Googled 'What God Wants for Christmas,' and I couldn't believe no one had ever written that," Rucker continued. "Of all the Christmas songs and all the ideas people have had no one had ever written 'I Wonder What God Wants for Christmas' and that was crazy to me. So, we sat down and just the whole time was so inspirational I think for all of us. We were sitting there writing the song and it was coming. Every line somebody said was a line we used and it was a great line."
  
  "We wanted to write one of those songs that years from now people are still listening to and people are still – and it's important to people," he concluded. "We wanted to put God back in Christmas, and that's what we tried to do with that song."
• The video includes Rucker's family: his wife Beth, daughters Carolyn and Daniella and son Jack. Some of the kids from the Children's Hospital at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston are also featured.
  
  The idea for the clip came from the singer being on the board of the Children's Hospital. "We wanted to just show – so many kids are sick with different things and it's just so sad, but you have great places like MUSC and St. Jude's that are helping these kids," Rucker said. "We just wanted to show that there's other sides of Christmas other than you just being with your family and opening gifts and stuff like that. There's other things. There's other things going on in the world [during] Christmas, and we wanted to show just a little piece of that."