For the record: Johnny Marks was awarded by the International Society of Santa Claus with the CHRISTMAS SPIRIT prize together with another great composer: Irving Berlin , author of WHITE CHRISTMAS and other beautiful songs we will talk about in one of the next chapters.
PICTURE 6. Here is a mature Johnny Marks in an almost intimate picture of the seventies.
The song was recorded in the July of 58 in one of the Decca offices with the Nashville producer Owen Bradley. It was one of the most muggy summers of the last years and the singer and the orchestra didn t manage to concentrate. Owen then set the air conditioning to the maximum and made shoot artificial snowballs to cool the air, he set up a big Christmas tree, with balls and colored lights, in the recording studios, to get a Christmas atmosphere for the singer and the whole staff. It seems that the idea worked perfectly and everybody had lots of fun, to the point that two only recording sessions were enough to finish the single. In 2014 the NPR, interviewing an old Brenda Lee, asked her playfully in what direction one should rock around the Christmas tree . The answer of the singer was immediate: South. Following the path of the sun. Even though he had Jewish origins, as his famous colleague Irving Berlin, Johnny Marks reached the fame as a composer of Christmas songs. In one of his many interviews he openly confessed to the question if he was happy of his success: : " Well, Im not very happy to be remembered just for some Eves folk songs! "