Songfacts®:

• The Darkness released this special novelty cut on December 15, 2003, to fall in with the UK Christmas Number One Race. Despite being the favorite with the bookmakers to top the official UK singles chart for the Xmas week, the track was beaten into the runners-up spot by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews' cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World."
• Frontman Justin Hawkins' lyrics are based around spending Christmas with a loved one who is distant during the rest of the year. He explained to Kerrang:
  
  "I thought about what it's like to be emotionally and geographically detached from somebody who was throwing themselves into their work for 51 weeks of the year. And what it's like to have only a few family days, and how the idea of filling those days with meaningful quality time activities keep you going whilst absent."
• The Darkness worked on the song with legendary producer Bob Ezrin. The track features a school choir from Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham College school, in New Cross, London, which Justin and Dan Hawkins' mother once attended.
  
  Ezrin has form for integrating children's choirs into rock songs: He's the man responsible for the kids singing on Pink Floyd's classic "Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)."
• The video finds the band unwrapping presents in a Christmassy log cabin. Justin Hawkins' love interest is played by his then-girlfriend and band manager, Sue Whitehouse. The clip was actually filmed in the height of the UK summer on the hottest day of the year.
• "Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)" was never meant to exist, at least not until The Darkness drunkenly promised their label they already had a Christmas single ready to go.
  
  The idea came after a heavy night at London's Met Bar with A&R executive Max Lousada. Fresh off the band's UK breakthrough, Lousada pushed for a festive release. When he asked if "Love Is Only A Feeling" could be reworked into a Christmas song, guitarist Dan Hawkins shot it down. Did the band have a holiday tune? "Yeah," he said, despite the fact they absolutely did not.
  
  The next morning, The Darkness were on their way to support Metallica at Dublin's RDS Arena, scrambling to make good on the bluff. Hawkins bought fairy lights and Christmas jumpers for the tour bus, and the group set to work. Frontman Justin Hawkins already had a jokey chorus from years earlier, and the band fleshed it out into a full song within a couple of hours. As Hawkins put it to NME: "We just blagged it, really."
• Even though the single was thrown together at speed, The Darkness were adamant about avoiding the holiday-song shortcut of adding sleigh bells to an unrelated tune. Hawkins said he wanted to compete in the Christmas chart race and make a genuine seasonal anthem, not a festive cosmetic job.