If, for some reason, you’ve ever wondered if Santa Claus visited Kokomo, here’s your answer.

In the 2003 film Love Actually, Bill Nighy plays an aging rock star named Billy Mack, trying to score a “Christmas #1” hit in England. (To do so is a big deal in the U.K. We wrote about it last year.) His stab is a cynically reworked version of the Troggs’ hit “Love Is All Around” called “Christmas Is All Around.” The word Christmas, and various other Christmas-type words are awkwardly shoehorned in.

It’s a pretty silly idea, and yet life has imitated art at least two times.

• By the 1980s, Brian Wilson had left the Beach Boys, allowing Mike Love to direct the band’s future. While this new incarnation of the band was not as critically adored as it once was, it scored a #1 hit in 1988 (its first hit in more than a decade) with a song Love co-wrote called “Kokomo.” (It’s about a couple going to a tropical paradise, and there are lots of lyrics that rhyme with the names of Caribbean islands.) In 2010, Love made a rare solo recording for a charity album called More Hope For the Holidays, to benefit diabetes research. Love wrote and recorded “Santa’s Goin’ to Kokomo.” It’s both a sequel and Christmas-version of the huge hit he co-wrote 22 years earlier.

• Cheap Trick had its first big hit in 1979 with “I Want You to Want Me” recorded live at the Budokan Arena in Japan. By 2012, Cheap Trick was still around, mostly playing the summer festival and state fair circuit. That year, it recorded a song for the A Very Special Christmas series of albums, which feature major pop and rock acts performing classic or original holiday songs. (The proceeds benefit the Special Olympics.) Cheap Trick’s contribution was a classic song, but also a new one. The band recorded “I Want You For Christmas,” a note-for-note remake of “I Want You to Want Me,” but with the word “Christmas” inserted into virtually every line.