Watch Broadway star Michael Maliakel perform "I Wonder as I Wander," with The Tabernacle Orchestra.

He completed the song later that year and published it soon after in 1934. “I Wonder as I Wander” quickly became a much-beloved Christmas carol worldwide.

I’ve experienced all those things these past few weeks while working on this countdown of the greatest Christmas songs of all time, an unabashedly subjective undertaking, from “White Christmas ...