My favorite, by Minnesota girl Judy Garland, is “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. Most hated is Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”.
In 2002, a Radio Television Luxembourg press kit for “The Christmas Shoes” movie based on Newsong’s best known hit, featured the group’s Christmas album which featured the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. Then-lead vocalist Michael O’Brien noted in the press kit from RTL (which like Newsong’s record label at the time were both owned by Bertelsmann) that the latter song was recorded “the way the song’s writer Hugh Martin originally wrote it before Judy Garland popularized it.”
Mr. O’Brien noted when he met Hugh Martin in 1990, the lyric “… through the years, we all will be together if the Lord allows…” was part of the actual lyric, but it was purged.
O’Brien notes. “Hugh told me, ‘That’s the original way I wrote it, so I want you to sing it this way,’” O’Brien recalls. “So one Christmas in that little church, Hugh Martin played piano, and I sang ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,’ and it was the thrill of my life. It’s pretty incredible for me to get to record it this way on an album.”
The correct in Hugh’s line version was also recorded by another artist whom I met a few times, most notably at the local March for Life in 1998 in a 1999 Christmas album where she did a duet with a late, great artist whose name once was on the Farmers Insurance Open. That artist was also a BMG artist at the time, so both artists recorded the song with Hugh’s correct lyric.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FttsMeAQOmQ