How I Accidentally Wrote a Christmas Hit: The Story of The Mince Pie Song
It was the middle of a London heatwave in 2019.
I was sitting in my underwear in a tiny flat, sweating profusely, singing the words:
"With a ho ho ho and a nom nom nom, gobble gobble gobble and the pie is gone."
To any normal person, this would sound like the beginning of a breakdown.
To make matters worse, when I tested the idea on a few friends, they looked at me as if I'd completely lost my mind. It was the middle of summer. The temperature outside was pushing 30 degrees. Nobody wanted to hear about Santa Claus or mince pies.
One friend asked why on earth I was writing Christmas songs during a heatwave.
Looking back, that was probably a reasonable question.
Six months later, that same ridiculous idea would become The Mince Pie Song, reach Number 1 on Amazon Music UK and hit Number 5 in Spotify's Viral UK chart.
This is the story of how it happened.
Why Mince Pies?
People often ask why I chose mince pies.
The answer is simple.
For me, mince pies are the first sign that Christmas is coming.
You walk into a supermarket in October and suddenly there they are. Stacked high near the entrance. Mince pies.
That moment tells you Christmas has officially begun.
It's a uniquely British tradition. We all recognise it instantly.
The more I thought about it, the more obvious the idea seemed.
Christmas songs had covered snow, reindeer, presents, sleigh rides and mistletoe. But nobody had written a proper Christmas song celebrating the nation's favourite festive snack.
As someone who loves food, the idea made me smile immediately.
And then another thought hit me.
Who loves mince pies more than anyone else?
Santa.
Millions of children leave him mince pies every Christmas Eve. If anyone deserves a song about them, it's him. The image of Santa enthusiastically singing about eating mince pies felt funny, charming and strangely believable.
The idea was too ridiculous not to try.
The Chorus Arrived First
The strange thing is that the chorus appeared before anything else.
"With a ho ho ho and a nom nom nom, gobble gobble gobble and the pie is gone."
As soon as that line popped into my head, I couldn't stop singing it.
I tried it out on a few friends.
The response wasn't encouraging.
Imagine somebody approaching you in the middle of a heatwave and enthusiastically singing about Santa eating mince pies.
They genuinely thought I'd lost it.
Looking back, that was probably the first sign I was onto something.
I've noticed over the years that many of the best ideas sound ridiculous when you first say them out loud.
If everyone instantly understands it, it's probably not that original.
Santa Couldn't Sing
At the time, I was building a Santa Alexa skill.
We already had someone to voice Santa.
Perfect, I thought.
We'll get Santa to sing the song.
There was only one problem.
Santa couldn't sing.
At least not well enough for what we needed.
We gave it a try, but it quickly became obvious that we'd need a proper singer for the musical sections while keeping our original Santa for the spoken parts.
Today, people would probably experiment with AI voices and all sorts of technology.
Back in 2019, we didn't have those options.
We had to solve the problem the old-fashioned way.
In hindsight, I'm glad we did.
The final version ended up having far more personality because of it.
Life Was Very Different Back Then
One thing that's easy to forget now is where I was when I wrote the song.
I wasn't an established songwriter.
I hadn't released successful music.
I certainly wasn't expecting to write a Christmas hit.
I was living in a small London flat and trying to make things work.
Money was tight enough that I genuinely wondered whether I'd need to start doing Deliveroo deliveries in the evenings just to help cover my rent.
The choice wasn't between writing a Christmas song and building a career.
It was between writing a Christmas song and figuring out how I was going to pay next month's rent.
Looking back, it's funny that while I was worrying about how I'd pay the bills, I was also spending my spare time writing a song about Santa eating mince pies.
Oddly enough, around the same time I was also writing a song called Farting Round The House.
Looking back, 2019 was apparently a very productive year for ridiculous song ideas.
But that's often how creative projects work.
You don't know which ideas are going to matter.
You don't know which ones are going to connect.
You just keep making things and hope something sticks.
Building the Song
Once we had the chorus, we built everything else around it.
There wasn't some grand strategy.
No complicated songwriting formula.
Just a lot of trial and error.
Writing.
Rewriting.
Changing lyrics.
Changing melodies.
Going backwards.
Going forwards.
Trying things that didn't work.
The whole project cost less than £5,000 to create, although it's difficult to put an exact number on it because many of the people involved were also working on other projects with me at the time.
What I remember most is that everyone involved genuinely cared about making it great.
Even though the idea itself was completely absurd.
Getting People to Hear It
Making a song is one thing.
Getting people to listen is another.
We weren't backed by a record label.
We didn't have a radio campaign.
We didn't have a huge marketing budget.
So we became slightly obsessed with finding every possible way to get the song in front of people.
We ran Spotify ads.
Experimented with Reddit ads.
Tested YouTube campaigns.
Worked with TikTok creators.
Back then, influencer marketing was a very different world.
You could work with genuinely huge creators for less than £200.
That sounds almost impossible today.
One of the smartest things we did was include the song inside our Santa Alexa skill.
Families were already spending time with Santa through Alexa, and now they could discover the song too.
That turned out to be a huge advantage.
In fact, over the years, the song has probably been played more times through Alexa than through streaming platforms.
Kids have a remarkable ability to listen to the same song over and over again.
Sorry to all the parents out their who have listened to the mince pie song on repeat.
The BBC Radio Suffolk Confusion
One of the strangest moments came when BBC Radio Suffolk played the song.
Which was exciting.
But also slightly confusing.
The presenter started talking about Santa as if he were a real musician. Then he began discussing Santa apparently growing up in Suffolk.
At that point, things seemed to unravel slightly.
You could almost hear the confusion creeping into his voice as he tried to work out whether Santa was a character, a person, or an actual recording artist.
Eventually, he seemed to give up trying to make sense of it all and simply played the track.
Listening to a local radio presenter genuinely wrestle with Santa's backstory before introducing the song remains one of the more surreal moments of my career.
When I Realised Something Special Was Happening
The moment I knew the song was working wasn't when it charted.
It wasn't when the streaming numbers started climbing.
It wasn't even when it reached Number 1 on Amazon Music.
It was when my phone started lighting up with messages from friends.
"Have you seen this?"
"Someone's talking about your song."
At first I had no idea what they were talking about.
Then I discovered that Mrs Hinch, one of the biggest influencers in the UK, had been talking about The Mince Pie Song and describing it as an earworm.
At the time, I had no idea who Mrs Hinch was.
Which probably says more about me than it does about her.
But she had millions of followers and people absolutely loved her.
The strange thing was that she wasn't being paid to talk about the song.
She simply liked it… or at least her child did.
That was the moment it started to feel real.
The song was escaping into the wild.
People were discovering it on their own.
Families were sharing it.
Influencers were posting about it.
Children were demanding it on repeat.
It belonged to the audience now.
That's when you know you've made something people genuinely enjoy.
Also, despite receiving approval from Britain's most famous cleaning influencer, my flat remained disappointingly untidy.
The Christmas Song Effect
There's an old joke in the music industry that if you write a successful Christmas song, you're set for life.
I don't know if that's true.
What I do know is that Christmas songs behave very differently from almost every other type of music.
Every year the same pattern appears.
Streams begin to climb as Halloween ends.
November gets bigger.
December gets bigger still.
Then Christmas arrives.
And after that?
The numbers fall off a cliff.
January arrives and it's almost as though the song never existed.
Until next Christmas.
Then the cycle begins all over again.
It's one of the strangest and most fascinating things I've ever experienced as a songwriter.
Why I Think It Worked
Looking back, I don't think the song succeeded because it was about mince pies.
I think it succeeded because of what mince pies represent.
For many people in Britain, seeing mince pies appear in the supermarket is the moment Christmas starts to feel real.
It's the beginning of the countdown.
The decorations come out.
The Christmas films start appearing on television.
The excitement begins building.
The song accidentally captured a very British Christmas moment that millions of people already recognised.
It wasn't really a song about pastry.
It was a song about Christmas arriving.
The Numbers
Since its release in 2019, The Mince Pie Song has accumulated well over 10 million streams across platforms.
It reached Number 1 on Amazon Music UK and Number 5 on Spotify's Viral UK chart.
Spotify alone accounts for more than 2.6 million streams.
What's even stranger is that Amazon Music significantly outperformed Spotify, largely because of the Alexa audience that discovered the song through our Santa experiences.
The song has also been played countless times through Alexa itself, meaning the true number of listens is far higher than the streaming figures alone suggest.
That's not a typical story in the music industry.
But then again, this was never a typical song.
What I Learned
Looking back, there are probably a hundred things I would do differently today.
I'd promote harder.
I'd invest more behind the songs I believe in.
I'd release more Christmas music to build on the audience we created.
But perhaps the biggest lesson is this:
Sometimes the ideas that sound the most ridiculous are the ones worth pursuing.
A Christmas song about mince pies shouldn't have worked.
My friends certainly didn't think it would.
Yet here we are.
Millions of streams later.
Every year, the mince pies reappear in supermarkets.
The streams start climbing.
Families press play.
And Santa starts singing again.
Every year, when the mince pies appear in the supermarket, I smile.
Because I remember sitting in that tiny London flat in the middle of a heatwave, singing about Santa eating mince pies and wondering how I was going to pay the rent.
It still feels slightly ridiculous.
Then again, maybe the best ideas always do.