THE “WEIRD” STORY BEHIND BRENDA LEE’S “ROCKIN’ AROUND THE CHRISTMAS TREE” — SHE WAS ONLY 13
It is one of the most familiar Christmas songs ever recorded. The opening notes of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” can instantly bring back memories of decorated living rooms, family gatherings, old holiday movies and Christmas mornings. But when Brenda Lee recorded the song in 1958, she was only 13 years old—and there was one strange detail about the session that she never forgot.
She wasn’t recording it in December.
She was recording a Christmas song in the middle of summer.
Looking back on the experience, Lee admitted that recording Christmas music during warm weather always felt a little strange. The calendar outside the studio had nothing to do with the season she was singing about. There was no winter snow, no cold December air and no holiday rush. Instead, there was a young teenage singer standing behind a microphone during the summer of 1958, preparing to record a song that would eventually become one of the most enduring sounds of Christmas.
But producer Owen Bradley understood that atmosphere mattered. Rather than allowing the summer setting to make the session feel completely disconnected from Christmas, he transformed the studio. A Christmas tree was brought in, and some of the musicians even dressed in Santa Claus suits.
Suddenly, the recording session became something different.
Brenda remembered the experience warmly, describing the laughter and atmosphere in the studio as part of the magic of that day. For a 13-year-old girl, it must have been an unusual sight: musicians preparing to record a Christmas classic while surrounded by decorations in the middle of summer.
And none of them could have known what that recording would eventually become.
“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was written by Johnny Marks, one of the most successful composers of Christmas songs in American popular music. Marks had already written holiday standards including “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” Interestingly, Lee later recalled asking Marks how he came up with “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”
His answer was almost as unexpected as the recording session itself.
Marks told her that he had been lying on a beach in New York. Pine trees were nearby, and after falling asleep for a short nap, he woke up facing the trees as they moved in the breeze. That image inspired the phrase “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” From that simple moment came a song that would eventually become inseparable from Christmas.
But the song did not immediately become the massive hit that generations would come to know.
For years, it remained a beloved holiday recording without dominating the charts in the way it eventually would. Then, decades later, something remarkable happened.
A new generation discovered it.
The 1990 film “Home Alone” helped bring the recording to an entirely different audience. Lee recalled receiving a phone call telling her that there was a movie called Home Alone and that her song was all over it. She reportedly didn’t even realize which song they were talking about at first.
That moment became part of the song’s extraordinary second life.
What had been recorded by a 13-year-old girl in a Nashville studio in 1958 was suddenly reaching millions of people who had not even been born when Brenda first sang it.
And the story became even more extraordinary in 2023.
Sixty-five years after its original release, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” finally reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Brenda Lee was then 78 years old, making her the oldest artist to reach the top of that chart at the time. The song also set a remarkable longevity record, taking 65 years from its original release to reach No. 1.
Think about that for a moment.
When Brenda Lee stood in that studio in 1958, surrounded by Christmas decorations in the middle of summer, she was just 13 years old. She could not possibly have known that the voice coming through that microphone would still be filling homes more than six decades later.
She could not have imagined that children born generations after the recording session would learn her voice before they ever learned her name.
She could not have known that the little Christmas song would become part of the soundtrack of countless families’ lives.
And perhaps that is what makes the story so beautiful.
The recording itself was not surrounded by snow or a traditional Christmas setting. It was created during a warm summer day, inside a Nashville studio decorated especially for the occasion. Yet somehow, everyone involved captured something that transcended the calendar.
They captured Christmas itself—the laughter, the warmth, the youthful excitement and the feeling of being together.
Brenda Lee’s voice did the rest.
More than six decades later, the little girl who once stood behind that microphone is still there every Christmas, singing to generation after generation.
She was only 13 when she recorded it. It was summer outside. But inside that studio, Brenda Lee helped create a Christmas memory that would never grow old.
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