Christmas Songs
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193 free Christmas Songs trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free Christmas songs trivia questions with answers. From Bing Crosby's White Christmas to Mariah Carey's holiday anthem, Christmas songs are the soundtrack of the season. This quiz covers classic carols, pop Christmas hits, novelty favorites, the songwriters behind them, chart records, and surprising origins. Whether you belt out carols or just hear them in every store from November onward, find out how much you really know about the music of Christmas.
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Q 01Which 1942 musical film, built around Irving Berlin songs, features Bing Crosby singing the best-selling single of all time?
Holiday Inn
Holiday Inn is set at an inn that opens only on holidays, so Irving Berlin had to write a song for each one; its Christmas number, 'White Christmas', went on to sell an estimated 50 million copies.
Q 02Which entertainer narrated the 1969 animated TV special 'Frosty the Snowman'?
Jimmy Durante
Jimmy Durante narrated the Rankin/Bass special in his final film role, almost two decades after he had released his own record of the song in 1950, the year it was written.
Q 03Which retailer's 1939 promotional story introduced the most famous reindeer of all?
Montgomery Ward
Montgomery Ward had been buying coloring books to give away each Christmas and asked copywriter Robert L. May for a story of its own to save money; about 2.4 million copies of his Rudolph booklet went out in 1939.
Q 04In 'Santa Baby', which luxury gift does the singer ask Santa for first?
A sable
A sable, a costly fur, opens the list; the requests then climb to a convertible, a yacht and the deed to a platinum mine in a lyric that Joan Javits, a senator's niece, wrote in 1953.
Q 05Which husband-and-wife act had the original 1979 recording of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"?
Elmo and Patsy
Elmo and Patsy, veterinarian Elmo Shropshire and his then-wife Patsy Trigg, pressed the single themselves in 1979 and sold it at their shows until a San Francisco radio DJ's airplay made it a hit.
Q 06"Last Christmas" was performed by which pop duo?
Wham!
Wham! had the hit, but George Michael wrote it alone: visiting his parents with Andrew Ridgeley in 1984, he slipped upstairs to his childhood bedroom and came back down with the melody.
Q 07Which lyricist wrote the words of 'Let It Snow' during a July 1945 Hollywood heatwave?
Sammy Cahn
Sammy Cahn and composer Jule Styne wrote it to think cool thoughts on a sweltering day, and their lyric never once mentions Christmas, only a snowstorm and a fire.
Q 08"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" was originally recorded by which singer in 1958?
Brenda Lee
Brenda Lee was 13 when she recorded 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree' for Decca in 1958; the single reached the Billboard Hot 100 top 20 in December 1960 after her pop breakthrough.
Q 09In which year did Mariah Carey's 1994 holiday single first top the Billboard Hot 100?
2019
It took 25 years, and when it finally went to number one it did so on 45.6 million streams in a single week.
Q 10Which LP is the best-selling Christmas record of all time worldwide?
Elvis' Christmas Album
Elvis' Christmas Album, from 1957, has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, although Irving Berlin so disliked its 'White Christmas' that he had his staff ask radio stations not to play it.
Q 11Under which title was 'Jingle Bells' first published in 1857?
The One Horse Open Sleigh
The One Horse Open Sleigh was James Lord Pierpont's title in 1857; his song has no Christmas in it at all and only became a holiday standard decades later.
Q 12In "Frosty the Snowman," what brought Frosty to life?
A silk hat
A silk hat does it: the children set one on his head and he starts to dance. Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson wrote the song in 1950 as a follow-up to the previous year's hit 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'.
Q 13Who first recorded 'The Christmas Song', the one about chestnuts roasting on an open fire?
Nat King Cole
Q 21Which carol did Frederick Oakeley translate from its Latin original in 1841?
O Come All Ye Faithful
O Come All Ye Faithful began in 1841 as Frederick Oakeley's 'Ye faithful, approach ye', translated from 'Adeste Fideles' for his London chapel; the opening was reworded into the familiar line before an 1852 hymnal printed it.
Q 22Which then-novel keyboard instrument did Tchaikovsky feature in his 1892 festive ballet score?
The celesta
The celesta, developed in Paris in 1886, makes its bell-like tone from struck metal plates; Tchaikovsky had his publisher order one from Paris in 1891, praising its 'divinely' unusual sound.
Q 23In 'The Twelve Days of Christmas', what does the singer's true love send on the fifth day?
Nat King Cole first recorded it with his trio in June 1946, then pushed Capitol, over the label's objections, into a second session with strings two months later, and that version became the hit.
Q 14Which country is the original home of the carol 'Silent Night'?
Austria
Austria: the carol was first sung on Christmas Eve 1818 in Oberndorf, near Salzburg, and two travelling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, then carried it abroad in their shows.
Q 15"Jingle Bell Rock" was originally performed by which artist in 1957?
Bobby Helms
Bobby Helms, a country singer, and guitarist Hank Garland both said they reworked the song heavily in the studio, adding its bridge, yet the writing credit stayed with Joe Beal and Jim Boothe.
Q 16'Last Christmas', long the highest-selling UK single never to reach number one, finally topped the chart in which year?
2021
2021 came on New Year's Day; the song has entered the UK chart every year since 2007 and became Christmas number one in 2023.
Q 17Who wrote the 1979 novelty song "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer"?
Randy Brooks
Randy Brooks wrote 'Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer' in 1978 and handed it to a duo he shared a Lake Tahoe bill with; their 1979 recording turned it into a perennial novelty hit.
Q 18Which animated film introduced Howard Blake's song 'Walking in the Air'?
The Snowman
'Walking in the Air' was written by Howard Blake for The Snowman, the 1982 Channel 4 animation of Raymond Briggs's book, where choirboy Peter Auty sang it; Aled Jones's 1985 cover reached the UK top five.
Q 19Who co-wrote Band Aid's 1984 famine-relief single with Midge Ure?
Bob Geldof
Bob Geldof wrote the lyric and Midge Ure the music after Geldof saw a television news report on famine in Ethiopia; Band Aid then recorded it in a single day with dozens of British and Irish pop stars.
Q 20Which carol did radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden say he played on violin in a 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast?
O Holy Night
O Holy Night, by Fessenden's own account in 1932, went out from Brant Rock, Massachusetts, to ship radio operators along the Atlantic coast; his claim to the first music broadcast has never been well documented.
Gold rings
Gold rings arrive on the fifth day, after four days of birds; the melody everyone now sings was introduced by the English composer Frederic Austin in his 1909 arrangement of the old carol.
Q 24Which Christmas song did some radio stations ban from 2018 over concerns about its lyrics?
Baby, It's Cold Outside
Baby, It's Cold Outside, which Frank Loesser wrote in 1944 to sing with his wife at parties, was pulled by Cleveland station WDOK and others in late 2018 after listeners objected to its lyric.
Q 25"Feliz Navidad" was written and performed by which Puerto Rican singer-songwriter?
Jose Feliciano
Jose Feliciano wrote it in a Hollywood studio in 1970 while homesick for his family's Christmases, and kept it to what he counts as 19 words; the recording entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010.
Q 26According to legend, 'Silent Night' was written for what instrument because the organ had broken?
Guitar
Guitar: Franz Gruber wrote the melody with a guitar accompaniment on 24 December 1818, hours after Joseph Mohr brought him the verses; whether flooding had really damaged the organ is uncertain.
Q 27Which songwriter wrote both "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree"?
Johnny Marks
Johnny Marks wrote both songs, adapting 'Rudolph' from a story by his brother-in-law Robert L. May; he founded his own publisher, St. Nicholas Music, to handle his Christmas catalogue.
Q 28The carol 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing' uses music adapted from which famous classical composer?
Felix Mendelssohn
Felix Mendelssohn wrote the tune in 1840 for a cantata honoring Gutenberg's printing press and said it would never suit sacred words; organist William Cummings fitted Charles Wesley's hymn to it anyway.
Q 29In "Winter Wonderland," what is the name of the snowman the couple builds?
Parson Brown
In the 1934 lyric the couple 'pretend that he is Parson Brown', a clergyman who asks 'Are you married?'; a 1947 children's verse replaced the parson with a circus clown.
Q 30Which instrument did the Gemini 6A crew smuggle into orbit to play a festive tune in 1965?
A harmonica
Wally Schirra played 'Jingle Bells' on a tiny Hohner harmonica while Tom Stafford shook sleigh bells, after the Gemini 6A crew reported a 'satellite' in polar orbit piloted by a figure in a red suit.