Songfacts®:

• All Spike Jones wanted for Christmas was his two front teeth, but Gayla Peevey was more ambitious with her holiday wish list. The 10-year-old singer expected Santa to deliver her a hippopotamus on Christmas morning in 1953, but she was willing to ease the burden by allowing him to walk the rotund mammal through the front door instead of trying to squeeze him down the chimney.
  
  The novelty tune served as the debut single for the Oklahoma native, who got her break that summer as a featured singer on Hoagy Carmichael's national TV show Saturday Night Revue. Columbia Records flew her to New York City to record the Christmas song with the Mitch Miller Orchestra. The single peaked at #24 on the Billboard pop chart in December 1953.
  
  Despite the success, Peevey's recording career never really took off. After releasing a string of failed singles throughout the rest of the decade, she rebranded herself as Jamie Horton and landed one more minor hit with "My Little Marine" in 1960. But if she was going to make her mark, she was glad it was with "I Want A Hippopotamus For Christmas."
  
  She told NPR in 2017: "If I have any legacy, what more fun legacy than to have a song that makes people happy and children dance around and brings a little cheer to the season?"
• This was written by Iowa-born songwriter John Rox, who penned the song "It's A Big, Wide, Wonderful World" for the 1940 Broadway musical All In Fun. Rox died in 1957, three years after his novelty tune hit the charts. (An unrelated fun fact: Rox was married to actress Alice Pearce, who originated the role of TV's nosiest neighbor, Gladys Kravitz, on Bewitched.)
• Peevey promoted the song during an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on November 15, 1953.
• In the lyrics, Peevey's mother employs scare tactics to get her daughter to pick a more sensible gift. What if the hippo wants to feast on a little girl for his Christmas dinner? But Peevey counters with the fact that hippopotamuses are vegetarians. While it's true that they are herbivores, hippos do eat meat when they get the opportunity.
• Peevey really did get her wish when she was presented with a 700-pound hippo named Mathilda in 1953 thanks to a fundraising effort by her hometown newspaper in conjunction with the Oklahoma City Zoo. Of course it was all a clever tactic to use the song's popularity to get a hippo for the zoo's menagerie. As luck would have it, the Bronx Zoo was willing to part with Mathilda, who was rejected by her potential mate, once the paper raised enough money for her transfer.
  
  "It was presented as being for me," Peevey told NPR. "It was called the Gayla Peevey hippo fund. And every day in the newspaper there was a little circle where you could tape your dime or your quarter and mail it in. But of course the zoo and the newspaper were sponsoring the fund and knew what the end result would be."
  
  In 1998, 47-year-old Mathilda died of a heart attack while being transferred from the Oklahoma City Zoo, her home for 45 years, to Disney World's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida.
• The song inspired Peevey's lifelong interest in the welfare of hippos, with the former singer often speaking at zoos about conservation efforts.
• "I Want A Hippopotamus" has been covered by a range of acts, including The Three Stooges, Bob Keeshan (aka Captain Kangaroo), LeAnn Rimes, Kacey Musgraves, and Gretchen Wilson. Wilson's version, featured on her holiday album Christmas In My Heart, peaked at #54 on the Country chart in 2010.
• Famed radio personality and music historian Dr. Demento included this song on his 1989 collection Dr. Demento Presents: Greatest Novelty Records of All Time, Vol. 6: Christmas.
• This was used on the TV series Ally McBeal in the 1998 episode "Making Spirits Bright."
• In a 2010 interview with Tulsa Films, Peevey said she'd never earned any royalties from her famous song. A few years later, however, her daughter, composer Sydney Forest, did some digging and found that Peevey had an account with Sony Music that held her earnings.
  
  "They were holding funds of just under a hundred grand that had been adding up since 2008," Peevey told The New York Times in 2016. "I couldn't believe it. It's pretty fun." She's also raking in royalties from sales on iTunes.
• This was used in a 2016 holiday campaign for the United States Postal Service. In the commercial, a little girl has her heart set on getting a hippopotamus for Christmas after seeing one at the zoo. Her parents order lots of hippo-related merchandise to be delivered in time for the holiday, only for their daughter to become enamored with a deer outside their living room window on Christmas morning.