The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)

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The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)
Written by Mel Tormé and Robert Wells, 1945

It’s hard to think of a cozier song than this one, with its crackling fire and frosty noses. Yet it was born on a sweltering afternoon in July 1945, in the middle of a Los Angeles heat wave. Nineteen-year-old Mel Tormé drove over to the Toluca Lake home of his songwriting partner, twenty-two-year-old Bob Wells, and let himself in. Bob was nowhere in sight, but on the piano sat a spiral notepad with four lines written in pencil: chestnuts roasting, Jack Frost nipping, carols sung by a choir, and folks dressed up like Eskimos.

When Bob finally appeared, he explained that he’d tried everything to cool off that day, including cold drinks and a cold shower. Then he’d wondered whether writing a few wintry lines might cool him down, at least in his mind. Mel looked at the pad and thought it might make a song. The two sat down together, and by Tormé’s own account the whole thing was finished in about forty-five minutes. Tormé wrote all the music and some of the words. Both young men were Jewish, which adds a gentle twist to the story of one of America’s best-loved Christmas songs.

Delighted with their afternoon’s work, they headed into Hollywood to play it for anyone who would listen. Johnny Burke at their publishing company wasn’t impressed. He felt a Christmas song would only be good for one day of the year. Their friend Nat King Cole felt differently. He fell in love with the song on the spot. In June 1946 he recorded it with his trio. Then, over the objections of his label, Capitol Records, he insisted on recording it again that August with a small string section and a harp. That version came out in November 1946 and became a big hit on both the pop and R&B charts. His earliest take has one little slip: Cole wonders whether “reindeers” really know how to fly, and the songwriters pointed out the grammar.

Cole kept coming back to the song. He recorded it again in 1953 with an orchestra conducted by Nelson Riddle, and once more in 1961, this time in stereo with a full orchestra. That 1961 recording is the one most of us hear on the radio every December, and it has had a remarkably long life. It reached number 65 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962 and climbed to number 11 in 2018. In January 2023 it finally entered the top ten for the first time, more than sixty-two years after it first appeared on the chart, which set a record. Cole’s original 1946 recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1974, and in 2022 the Library of Congress chose the 1961 version for preservation in the National Recording Registry.

Both writers went on to long careers. Tormé became a beloved jazz singer known as “The Velvet Fog.” He recorded the song himself many times, and in 1963 he wrote a new opening verse for it while working on Judy Garland’s television show. Wells went on to write for film and television, winning six Emmys and co-writing the theme song for The Patty Duke Show. Their summertime daydream has become one of the most-performed Christmas songs of all time, offered, as its last verse says, to kids “from one to ninety-two.”