In 2000, Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live castmate Horatio Sanz needed to come up with a holiday song for Saturday Night Live while hanging out at their studio office late one night. “We always try to write something musical for the holidays,” Jimmy Fallon tells the American Songwriter. “And someone had given me a backpacker guitar for Christmas, which is a tiny little guitar that you take backpacking—I have no idea what you use the guitar for. So I had this little guitar, and Horatio was playing with it in the office, and it [the guitar] had this ticky little sound to it.”
Around 2 a.m., Sanz found a good riff with the backpacker and they started piecing together … something.
“I’ve always had a keyboard from the ’80s in the office and had some pre-recorded drum beats and loops that you can play with different chords,” added Fallon. “So we were pretending ‘What if we were writing a really, a great pop song but dumb lyrics and that’s what we ended up doing. It was just a keyboard and that little guitar, and he wrote all the lyrics.”
On a 2017 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Sanz recalled the night they made the song. “I was kind of going around like a minstrel playing down the hallways, and then people just latched on,” remembered Sanz. “Jimmy found that chord, and he found the bridge, and then Tracy [Morgan] was like, ‘I wanna be in that.’”
Videos by American Songwriter
The “Goof” Takes Off
Fallon says he didn’t think anything of the song after their pre-Christmas jam session at 30 Rock. “I went home around 3 a.m. that morning and was thinking ‘I guess we didn’t write anything,’” recalls Fallon. “I came in the next day, and Horatio says ‘Dude, I submitted that Christmas song.’ I was like, ‘You did? All right, I’ll do it with you.’ We just did it as a goof and then it was like ‘Oh my God, it took off.’”
The two, along with SNL castmates Morgan and Chris Katan debuted “I Wish It Was Christmas Today” on the December 9, 2000 holiday episode. All in maroon sweaters, Sanz played his backpacker guitar, Katan held Fallon’s keyboard, and Morgan danced along to their right without saying a word.
“We didn’t tell him [Morgan] anything,” says Sanz of how their four roles came together. “That whole dance, it’s just him.”
“I Wish It Was Christmas” Returns
The skit was such a hit that the foursome returned to perform it on SNL again before Christmas a week later on the December 16 episode. “It was just a keyboard and that little guitar, and I didn’t even think it would be anything,” Fallon tells American Songwriter. “Then Julian Casablancas redid it and made it into a real song [and it] played on the radio.”
Nearly a decade after it premiered on SNL, Julian Casablancas released his punk rendition of their song as a bonus track on his 2009 album, Phrazes For The Young.
Sanz, Fallon, Morgan, and Katan continued to reprise their roles and the song many more times on SNL throughout the next decade, including a Memorial Day edition in 2001. They even added a special Easter version in 2004 and reappeared on SNL again in 2011.
The “band” also got back together for a rendition of “I Wish It Was Christmas Today” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2018.
“I’ve always been into [Christmas music],” says Fallon, who released his first holiday album in 2024, Holiday Seasoning. “It’s such a good rush.”
[RELATED: 7 Songs You Didn’t Know Jimmy Fallon Wrote]
Photo: Jimmy Fallon (Rosalind O’Connor/NBC via Getty Images)
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.