The Jackson 5 spent 1970 doing the impossible, and then they did something even stranger: they made a Christmas record that the main Billboard chart refused to count. The Jackson 5 Christmas Album arrived on October 15, 1970, as the fourth studio album from the young Motown group and their first holiday collection. It was a bold move for a band whose year had already been a blur of releases and touring.
Production, Arrangements and Track List
Motown, the Detroit soul label, put the album out with production from The Corporation and Hal Davis, while James Anthony Carmichael and Gene Page handled the arrangements. The record ran just over 34 minutes and packed 11 tracks. Side one opened with familiar standards like "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town," then moved through "The Christmas Song," "Up on the House Top," and "Frosty the Snowman." Side two kept the holiday mood with "The Little Drummer Boy," "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and four more seasonal cuts, including "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."
The group was not coasting. In 1970 alone, the Jackson 5 released three albums: ABC in May, Third Album in September, and this Christmas set in October. They also toured from May through December, which meant the holiday songs were recorded and promoted while the brothers were still moving from city to city. That pace would have buried most acts, but the Jackson 5 turned the overload into momentum.
The Billboard Chart Ban
There was one problem the group could not outwork. From 1963 to 1973, holiday albums were not allowed onto the main Billboard Top LPs chart. So the Jackson 5 Christmas Album had to prove itself in a separate Christmas chart, where it spent four weeks at the top in December 1970. It became the best-selling Christmas album of that year in the United States, and then it did the same thing again in 1972.
From 1963 to 1973, holiday albums were not allowed onto the main Billboard Top LPs chart.
The single "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" gave the album a radio life that outlasted the season. Along with "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," it still returns to American airwaves every December. That staying power helped push worldwide sales past 3 million copies, a number that feels even larger when you remember the album was locked out of the main chart during its original run.
The chart ban did not stop the record from finding its audience, and neither did time. Decades later, the album reached number 28 on the Billboard 200 and climbed to number 5 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Those placements came long after the original vinyl release, proof that the songs had become part of the holiday canon rather than a one-season novelty.
The Jackson 5 Christmas Album also earned a gold certification in Denmark, a quiet marker of how far the record traveled beyond its American roots. For a group of brothers from Gary, Indiana, who had spent 1970 sprinting through albums and tour dates, the Christmas project could have been an afterthought. Instead, it became the holiday album that outsold the field twice and kept returning to charts and radio decades after its first pressing.