The album was written by Jimmy Webb and features vocals by Garfunkel, Grant, and Wimbledon King's College Choir.

During the early 1980s, Jimmy Webb began writing the songs that would become The Animals' Christmas, based on a children's book about the Nativity of Jesus by Anne Thaxter Eaton.

In '83, my friend Jimmy Webb showed me a piece he was writing, a cantata for children's choir and small orchestra for his local church in Tuxedo, New York.

And it being a noncommercial endeavor, I was particularly interested in it, because I had become cynical about the fact that the record business will professionalize one's musical attempts in a way that can hurt them.

By the next year, he had written an extension, doubled its length and wrote various sections for me as solo singer, narrator and the angel Gabriel.

I started in London in '85 and recorded the London Symphony Orchestra; we added the choir from Wimbledon that winter; come the spring I was in Montserrat doing my vocals with Geoff Emerick; I traveled to Nashville to get Amy Grant's vocals on the album, then came to New York for some percussion overdubs—Steve Gadd on drums, and others.