In addition, some Harrison biographers view "Ding Dong" as an attempt to emulate the success of two glam rock anthems from the 1973–74 holiday season: "Merry Xmas Everybody" by Slade, and Wizzard's "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday".

Recorded at his Friar Park studio, the track includes musical contributions from Tom Scott, Ringo Starr, Alvin Lee, Ron Wood and Jim Keltner.

For the first time with one of his singles, Harrison made a promotional video for "Ding Dong", which features scenes of him miming to the track at Friar Park while dressed in a variety of Beatle-themed costumes.

[5][6] Harrison included the song on his All Things Must Pass triple album, released in November 1970,[7] by which time he had begun incorporating into his new compositions some of the homilies and aphorisms that Crisp had inscribed around the property, 70 or more years before.

[17][18][19] In the case of "Ding Dong" and other tracks from the Dark Horse album, however, author Simon Leng recognises this haste as an example of Harrison abandoning his careful approach to his own music over the 1973–74 period, while remaining a "painstaking craftsman" on his concurrent projects with Ravi Shankar and the vocal duo Splinter.

[20] Preceding this change, elements of the British media had ridiculed Harrison's continued association with the Hare Krishna movement,[21] and some music critics had objected to the overtly spiritual content of his 1973 album Living in the Material World.

[27][28] Aside from himself, on acoustic guitar, the other musicians on the track were Gary Wright (piano), Klaus Voormann (bass), Ringo Starr and Jim Keltner (both on drums)[29] – all of whom had appeared on Living in the Material World earlier in the year.

"[34][nb 1] Harrison included a rough mix of "Ding Dong" on a tape he sent to Asylum Records boss David Geffen in January 1974,[11] shortly before travelling to India to visit Shankar and escape his unhappy domestic situation with Boyd.

[29] Leng cites the inclusion on the finished version of "Ding Dong" of harmonium and distorted electric guitars, similar to the Slade hit, while Harrison's use of baritone saxophones, two drummers and tubular bells, together with a female choir,[15] matched the arrangement on "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday",[43] which was heavily influenced by Spector's sound.

[69] In the United States, where "Dark Horse" had already been issued in advance of the album, "Ding Dong" was coupled with the instrumental "Hari's on Tour (Express)" and released two days before Christmas (as Apple 1879).

[73][74] Combined with the positioning of "Ding Dong" as the opening track on side two, this detail gave the impression that the song represented Harrison's ushering-in of his future wife and a farewell to Boyd.

[95][96] In keeping with the song's message, Harrison refused to celebrate the past in his concerts by pandering to nostalgia for the Beatles,[59][97] and many in the mainstream music press criticised the poor state of his voice and his decision to feature Ravi Shankar so heavily in the program.

[52] While remarking on the surprisingly late release for a holiday-season single, Billboard's reviewer deemed the track an "Extremely listenable performance" and added: "George has a genuine hit sound to offer here that's just right for those early January time-to-change resolutions.

"[109] In the 1978 edition of The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler dismissed the song as "meticulously-played emptiness, a charmless reworking of the traditional peal o' bells" before concluding: "A pox on it.

"[110] Writing in his 1977 book The Beatles Forever, Nicholas Schaffner rued that "the exquisite, painstaking arrangements" of Harrison's earlier albums were absent from Dark Horse, and labelled "Ding Dong" "a string of greeting-card clichés with trite music to match".

"[111] Writing for Goldmine in January 2002, Dave Thompson described it as "sweetly simplistic" and "a sterling stab at a Christmas anthem … that deserved far better than its low Top 40 chart placings in the U.S. and Britain".

[82] In his 2010 book on Harrison for the Praeger Singer-Songwriter series, Ian Inglis comments that the song had neither the "overt political message" of Lennon's Christmas single nor the "unashamed commercialism" of Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime", and writes that "Ding Dong"'s "somewhat halfhearted festive appeal" seems out of place on Dark Horse.

[15] Simon Leng views the song as an "intermittently amusing rocker", but with the perilous state of Harrison's voice on the recording, "Ding Dong" would have benefited from "hibernating another winter".

[112] Among reviews of the 2014 Apple Years reissue of Dark Horse, Paste's Robert Ham refers to the song as "a Christmas anthem … that is as infectious as McCartney's 'Wonderful Christmastime' and as globally minded as Lennon's 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)'".

Trynka labels it "George's own Frog Chorus", with reference to McCartney's 1984 children's song, "We All Stand Together", and adds: "its clunking glam evokes those horrible 70s TV shows where DJs drool over dollybirds in hotpants.

"[114][115] In December 1999, while promoting his album I Wanna Be Santa Claus, Starr hosted a Christmas-themed radio show for New York's MJI Broadcasting, during which he featured "Ding Dong" along with the singles by Lennon and McCartney, as well as seasonal recordings by Spector and by a selection of Motown artists.

[42] His attire in these scenes represents a chronology of periods in the band's career[118] – starting with the Hamburg-era black leathers, followed by 1963 mop-top wig and grey collarless suit, and then the iconic Sgt.

[118][123] In these scenes, he wears scruffy, present-day attire that represents "his own, new identity", according to Leng, who likens Harrison's appearance to the character on the cover of Jethro Tull's Aqualung album.

[42] At the end of the clip, he is seen at the flagpole on the roof of the house, replacing a pirate standard with his yellow-and-red Om flag[118] – a gesture that was the opposite of Boyd's when she learned of Harrison's affair with Maureen Starkey.