Your favourite Christmas song of all time.

There must come a moment in the life of any nostalgia-based website when it feels compelled to scrape the bottom of the barrel and ask the question that cannot be avoided.

And, my friends, that moment has arrived. After eight years of evading it, I'm finally tackling the always thorny issue of just what is the best Christmas song of all time.

Obviously, it's Merry Xmas Everybody by Slade and I'm sure my total certainty about this has nothing to do with it having been the first song I ever heard on my first ever radio, way back in the winter of 1973.

With its Beano Annual sensibility and its strange shifts in tone from the jovial to the darkly glimmering, it perfectly caught the mood of a British Christmas. Like the band's earlier hit Coz I Luv You, it managed to sound like it had been around since before any of us were born but also to simultaneously hint at the impending arrival of an unsettling new era.

But what a remarkable winter that was. Not only did it give us Slade's masterpiece, it also gave us Wizzard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, and two songs that each demanded to be Christmas Number One by right found themselves battling it out for the privilege.

Of course, a year before that had seen the release of John and Yoko's Happy Xmas (War is Over) although the decade prior to that had been a strangely quiet one for Christmas classics.

In fact, I'm struggling to think of any great Christmas songs from the 1960s or, indeed, any Christmas songs at all from that decade - unless one has the courage to recall Dora Bryan's All I Want For Christmas is a Beatle.

I can only assume people didn't celebrate Christmas in the 1960s.

The 1950s is a total black hole for me when it comes to Christmas songs.

The 1940s, of course, gave us White Christmas, the Everest of Christmas hits.

That decade also gave us Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and The Christmas Song, otherwise known as Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.

The 1930s gave us Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Who would have guessed that Bruce Springsteen was making records way back in the 1930s?

But, while 1973 may have hit Peak Christmas, the 1970s had at least two more tricks up their sleeves. 1975 gave us Greg Lake's I Believe in Father Christmas, written specially for anyone who likes to be a Mr Grumpy Boots each Yuletide, while 1977 gave us the ever bizarre alliance of Bing Crosby and David Bowie bringing Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy into our lives.

Having said that, the track wasn't released until early the next decade, when such awesomeness couldn't be kept from the world any longer.

The 1980s gave us Merry Christmas Everyone by Shakin' Stevens, Stop the Cavalry by Jona Lewie, Macca's Wonderful Christmas Time, the Waitresses' Christmas Wrapping, Siouxsie and the Banshees' Israel, Kate Bush's December Will Be Magic Again, Do They Know It's Christmas? Wham's Last Christmas and Fairy Tale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl.

The 1990s gave us Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas is You, possibly the only Christmas track from that decade that's managed to match the popularity of its predecessors from earlier eras.

The 1990s also gave us East 17's anomalous Stay Another Day, one of those Christmas songs that has nothing at all to do with Christmas, other than that the band were wrapped up warm in the video.

That raises the perennial question; "Is Frankie Goes to Hollywood's The Power of Love a Christmas song?" All common sense says no. And yet it's somehow become inextricably linked with the festive period in a way that many singles which have made far more effort to be Christmassy haven't.

And what of the 21st Century? What Christmas treats has that given us when it comes to music?

Well, it's given us...

...erm...

...er...

To be honest, the only post 2000 AD Christmas song I can think of is the Darkness' heavily ironic Christmas Time, which is great fun but sounds suspiciously like a hyperactive teenager's parody of those 1973 Christmas hits that launched this post in the first place.

Can it be true? Can the era of the great Christmas song be dead?

I have no idea.

Perhaps you do have an idea.

More to the point, perhaps you have your own thoughts about what's the best Christmas song of all time. And perhaps you'd like to share them with the world, in the comments section below. If you would, you can. That is, after all, what the spirit of Christmas is all about.

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And more sharing.