Ah, Christmas.  That wonderful time of the year when the chart abandons even the faintest pretence of making sense.

Let’s try starting with the month’s number ones, and then have a look at the rest.

4, 11 and 18 December 2015 – Justin Bieber, “Love Yourself”

The astonishing newfound popularity of Justin Bieber – who, let’s not forget, went over five and a half years before getting his first number one – continued apace, with the third number one from his current album.  It’s a decent enough break-up song, recognisably co-written by Ed Sheeran, but more surprising is that it replaced his own single “Sorry” at number one.  This makes him only the fourth act to have consecutive number one singles in the UK.  The others were Elvis Presley (at the start of 2005, when they were doing a weekly reissue programme of his old hits), John Lennon (in 1981, for the obvious reason), and the Beatles (in 1963).

As I’ve said before, the fact that Bieber finds himself in that sort of company is partly an artefact of the fact that this sort of thing is easier in the digital era, when every track on your album can be a single simultaneously.  In fact, technically, this isn’t a single at all, just a very popular album track.  But the digital era has been going for years now and nobody’s done it before.  It’s still a pretty remarkable success.

But it’s the Christmas number one that the public care about, and Justin Bieber is not the Christmas number one.

25 December 2015: The Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir – “A Bridge Over You”

What we have here is an amateur choir of National Health Service staff doing a version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” with a bit of Coldplay thrown in.  This was actually released two years ago, but it’s the beneficiary of this year’s now-traditional campaign to get something to be the Christmas number one.  It’s a charity record, but it’s also unambiguously intended as a political statement of support for the NHS.  A policy wonk might argue about how meaningful a statement that is, since pretty much everyone in the country at least claims to be in favour of the NHS.  But the subtext is that it’s an anti-government record.  You don’t stick an Aneuran Bevan quote in your video, and give interviews about how the campaign is designed to boost NHS morale at a difficult time, if the aim is to agree with David Cameron.

Obviously, records like this get to number one largely on the strength of the message – people buy them as a badge of allegiance and because they like the story of getting the single to number one.  Judged purely as a piece of music, this is a superior amateur choir doing “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, which is perfectly fine but hardly the stuff number ones are made of.  At time of writing, the NHS Choir single is already down to 37 on the iTunes chart, which means pretty much nobody is buying it on the back of the publicity it received from getting to Christmas number 1.

The introduction of streaming to the chart makes life much more difficult for this sort of record, and in fact Justin Bieber was ahead for much of the week, until he decided to tell his fans to go and buy the NHS record instead.  Bieber’s support for the NHS prompted some surprise from certain corners of the press, mainly those who didn’t previously realise he was Canadian.  The choir would have taken it anyway, on the basis of publicity in the second half of the week, but it might well have been closer.

Perhaps the more interesting thing, though, is that Justin Bieber was in the running for Christmas number one at all, with a record that had already been on the chart for six weeks and spent three of them at number one.  Where was the competition?  The answer, put shortly, is that nobody else wanted to go up against the NHS Choir or the X Factor winner’s single – a cover of “Forever Young” by Louisa Johnson – which everyone assumed would be a massive seller.

It wasn’t.

Now, Johnson was always going to be at a disadvantage compared to previous winners, for several reasons.  First, there’s the streaming effect, which is starting to be significant.  Winners singles work as the climax of a narrative, and that’s not something that drives people to listen on Spotify.  And second, there’s the change in the chart week, which now runs from Friday to Thursday.  But the X Factor single is still coming out on Sunday night.  And because of its wonky audience, it still sells a lot of copies on CD at supermarket checkouts.  Those didn’t hit the shops until very late in the day.

Even so.  Johnson had first-week sales of around 39,000 copies, compared to over 200,000 for last week’s winner.  With negligible streaming, that was enough to get her to a dismal number 9.  The X Factor is still releasing its singles in the week before Christmas to avoid another Rage Against The Machine fiasco, but in its second week out, the single dropped to 14.  By X Factor standards this is a deeply embarrassing flop.

Frankly, part of the blame has to go to whoever chose “Forever Young”, which is just not a very good song for this purpose.  But the bigger deal is that X Factor simply isn’t the force it once was, and it’s probably on its way out.  This year, the X Factor single wasn’t kept off number one by campaigns, or even by the timing issue.  The bottom line is not enough people cared, and that has never been a problem for the show before.  Simon Cowell can live with being hated, but he may find it much tougher to simply be ignored.

Regardless, the upshot is that the run of Christmas number ones which are either reality TV or charity singles, or campaigns against them, enters its twelfth year.  (The last Christmas number one which was none of the above was the Donnie Darko version of “Mad World” in 2003.)  Ironically, the NHS Choir are both a charity record and a reality TV record, since they were formed by Gareth Malone for the BBC2 series Sing While You Work, and the track was originally recorded back then.

Also charting in December:

• “You Don’t Own Me” by Grace featuring G-Eazy, which has been floating between 4 and 6 all month.  Grace Sewell is an Australian singer and already had a number 1 with this oddity back home.  It’s a cover, with a cut-up production on the verses, but lurching into a faithful original arrangement for the chorus.  It works surprisingly well.  The original was by Lesley Gore, and got to number 2 in the US in 1963 (stuck behind the “I Want to Hold Your Hand”). For some reason it wasn’t a hit in the UK, where her best known single is “It’s My Party”.  It was covered on X Factor the previous week, which must have helped.
• “Sweet Lovin'” by Sigala featuring Bryn Christopher, with three weeks in the top 10, peaking at 3.
• “Shut Up” by Stormzy, which got to 8 (beating the X Factor single) when he promoted it as an anti-X Factor campaign type thing.  This is actually the B-side of “Wickedskengman 4”, which got to number 18 in September, but since people are now downloading it as a standalone track, it registers as an entry in its own right.
• “History” by One Direction, currently at 8 and climbing.  This is their farewell single before their, ahem, “hiatus”.  It scraped 37 as an album track in November, so technically it’s a re-entry.
• “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey.  Back again, as it has been every year since 2007.  This time, it got to 11.
• “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl, which is in similar territory.  It got to 13 this year, which is actually pretty typical for it.
• “Coming Home” by Sigma featuring Rita Ora, which peaked at 15 after Ora did it on X Factor (where she’s now a judge).
• “Girl is Mine” by 99 Souls featuring Destiny’s Child & Brandy at 15 (and climbing).  A mash-up of “Girl” by Destiny’s Child (number 6 in 2005) and “The Boy is Mine” by Brandy & Monica (number 2 in 1998).  The Destiny’s Child bit is a sample, but Brandy & Monica’s bit has been re-recorded by Brandy, which is why Monica is missing from the artist credit.  And yes, apparently it is harder to clear Brandy & Monica samples than Destiny’s Child.  Who knew?
• “Last Christmas” by Wham, which managed number 18 this year.
• “Stitches” by Shawn Mendes at 25 and climbing.  Canadian singer making his chart debut.  This has been a hit internationally, so it’s likely to do well in the January release void.
• “Merry Christmas Everyone” by Shakin’ Stevens, the Christmas number 1 of 1985, but not one of the reliable top 40 perennials.  It gets to 26 this year, largely because he was promoting a new version.
• “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” by Wizzard, making 27 this year.
• “Driving Home for Christmas” by Chris Rea, at 29, which is its highest chart position to date.  (It failed to chart on first release in 1988, but did get to number 33 in 2007 when Iceland used it in an advert.)
• “Sugar” by Robin Schulz featuring Yates, peaking at 28.  It’s not much, but it’s a follow-up to last year’s “Prayer in C”, so it gets Schulz off the official one-hit wonder list.  Francesco Yates is a singer from Toronto, and the track is based on a sample from “Suga Suga” by Baby Bash, a modest international hit from 2003 (though not in the UK).
• “Do They Know It’s Christmas” by Band Aid – the original, obviously – making 38.
• “Light It Up” by Major Lazer featuring Nyla enters at 40 on the Christmas chart, having been climbing from the lower reaches for a few weeks.