https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/the-making-of-greg-lake-s-i-believe-in-father-christmas-833/
It’s difficult to sum up the impact of first hearing “I Believe In Father Christmas” as a child in 1975. Greg Lake’s one and only hit solo single defied the jolly party vibe defined by 1973’s Slade shout-along “Merry Christmas Everybody,” while also bringing a subversive political dimension to the traditional “White Christmas”-style ballad. Lyrics that spoke accusingly of an all-powerful “They” who had “sold us a dream of Christmas” and a “fairy story” about “the Israelite” informed you that you’d been brainwashed by commercialism and Christianity. This was before an ironic yet uplifting orchestral motif transported you to a magical Lapland where Santa was still driving a reindeer sleigh piled high with children’s gifts through twinkling snow. Was this record saying that Christmas was great after all? Or nothing more than a soulless sham? And then you saw the video…
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Greg Lake (singer, guitarist, co-writer, co-producer): I wrote it in my house in west London. I’d tuned the bottom string on my guitar from E down to D and got this cascading riff that you hear on the record. But I couldn’t really place what the song was about. I was out driving one day and it was playing on my mind, and, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that the tune of “Jingle Bells” fitted over it. And I thought, ‘Ah… I wonder if this could be a song about Christmas?’ At the same time, I was working with Pete Sinfield on my solo side of the Works album, and I said to Pete, “I’ve been working on this melodic idea. It could be a Christmas song.”
Peter Sinfield (co-writer, co-producer): No. I remember him playing the riff and me saying it sounds like a Christmas song. Him saying it was not the sort of thing he would do. It’s out of character. Not that it matters. It’s quite amusing that there are two egos here, both of which might supersede the truth.
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Sinfield: Some of it was based on an actual thing in my life when I was eight-years-old, and came downstairs to see this wonderful Christmas tree that my mother had done. I was that little boy. Then it goes from there into a wider thing about how people are brainwashed into stuff. Then I thought, ‘This is getting a bit depressing. I’d better have a hopeful, cheerful verse at the end.’ That’s the bit where me and Greg would’ve sat together and done it. And then I twisted the whole thing with the last line, “The Christmas you get, you deserve”, which was a play on “The government you get, you deserve”. I didn’t necessarily explain all the politics or the thoughts behind it. It’s not anti-religious. It’s a humanist thing, I suppose. It’s not an atheist Christmas song, as some have said.
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Greg Lake and Ian Anderson performing the song at St. Bride's Church, London, in 2011:
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