Songfacts®:

• "Wonderful Christmastime" was recorded during the sessions for the McCartney II album, where Paul once again retreated to his farm and laid down all the tracks himself. This time he was experimenting with the new electropop movement, which explains the weird boinging sound throughout the song. This sound was created by an early synthesizer called a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, which was also used on Kim Carnes' "Bette Davis Eyes" and the Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes."
• The Beatles never had an official Christmas release, although they distributed "Christmas Time Is Here Again" to their fan club in 1967. As solo artists, however, all four members released Christmas songs. This one and John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" have endured and continue to get airplay in the holiday season. Note that Lennon's Christmas classic doubles as an anti-war song, while McCartney is simply having a wonderful Christmastime. It was often that way in The Beatles, too, where McCartney tended to write more upbeat songs like "I've Just Seen a Face" and Lennon would get political on songs like "Revolution."
• Paul McCartney was winding down his band Wings when he released this song at the end of 1979. Their last studio album, Back To The Egg, was issued that summer.
  
  Wings' last tour was in November and December 1979, so they included "Wonderful Christmastime" in the set, with some fake snowfall as they played it. McCartney moved forward as a solo artist, landing a big hit in "Coming Up" and a huge hit in 1982 with his Stevie Wonder duet "Ebony and Ivory."
• Although the members of Wings don't appear on the song (McCartney did all the vocals and played all the instruments), they do appear in the song's music video, which was filmed at the Fountain Inn in Ashurst, West Sussex. McCartney recalled to NME in 2012: "We went out to some pub somewhere, and so that was a laugh... we just run out of the pub occasionally, filmed a bit, and then went back into the pub. So that was quite a nice evening!"
  
  The video was directed by Russell Mulcahy, whose work was all over MTV when it launched in 1981. He made the very first video aired on the network: "Video Killed The Radio Star" by the Buggles.
• "Wonderful Christmastime" wasn't a big hit when it was released, charting at #6 in the UK and not charting at all in America. But it aged well and continues to receive substantial airplay every year. "The song is what we in the industry call an evergreen, because it gets played all the time," explained entertainment attorney Bernie Resnick to Forbes. "[McCartney's] publishing royalty check every fourth quarter probably has a lot of zeros on the end."
  
  According to the Forbes website, another industry source estimates that McCartney earns over $400,000 royalties a year from the song. That sounds greatly inflated to us; songwriters with recurrent hits tell us their biggest song might pull in $10,000 a year, tops.
• Martin Sheen, John Spencer, and Stockard Channing of The West Wing covered this song for the NBC Celebrity Christmas album in 2000. Also Eli Young Band recorded a version on the 2011 compilation The Country Christmas Collection. Their cover peaked at #33 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in January 2012.
• McCartney performed the song on the December 15, 2012 episode of Saturday Night Live.
• The song was released as a single with "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reggae" as the B-side. It later appeared on reissues of the McCartney II and Back To The Egg albums.
• De La Soul sampled this for their song "Simply" on their 2001 album AOI: Bionix.