Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End)
Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End) is a single by the British rock band The Darkness. It was released on 15 December 2003 to compete for the UK Christmas number one and finished as runner-up. The song later appeared on a Christmas edition of their debut album Permission to Land, which came out in some parts of Europe on 22 December 2003. The track is a festive, glam-metal style song that mentions Santa, bells and celebrations, sung in Justin Hawkins’s high falsetto.
A school choir from Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College in New Cross, London, provides backing vocals for the song and appears in the video. The song is known for its playful humor and double meanings, with line jokes like bells end (bellend) and ring in peace (ringpiece).
The video shows the band unwrapping presents. Justin Hawkins imagines his girlfriend (the Darkness’s manager at the time) in a bauble and in the fire. He goes outside, where a choir appears and sings the song. The band joins in, and then Justin enters a car with his girlfriend. A spaceship from the band’s other videos flies across the sky with “Merry Christmas” written in glitter.
In the race to be Christmas number one, an early favourite was a Pop Idol finals cover of John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” But The Darkness eventually faced Gary Jules and Michael Andrews’s cover of “Mad World” and finished in second place, making it one of the closest Christmas battles. First-week sales were 222,561, and the single sold about 5,000 copies fewer than “Mad World.” Overall, it sold about 385,000 copies over the Christmas period.
The track also appeared as the backing music for the Christmas version of the iOS game Robot Unicorn Attack in November 2010.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:18 (CET).