If ever there was an ambassador for Christmas, it’s Darlene Love.

“My favorite season of the whole year is Christmas,” she says. “People forget about me all year. In November, they remember.”

She might not be a household name, but chances are you know her. In 1963, she recorded the Phil Spector song “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Since, the song has been covered by U2, KT Tunstall, Joey Ramone and others. But Love’s original version, with her wailing, emotive soprano, is a quintessential Christmas song.

Love, 68, a minister’s daughter, grew up in Los Angeles. Under Spector’s guidance, she sang such hits as “Today I Met the Boy I’m Gonna Marry” and “He’s a Rebel.”

Despite her soulful, uninhibited lead vocals, Love found success mostly as a backup singer.

“Most singers can’t do background. Truly they can’t blend,” she says. It’s about working well with others, she notes.

And Love has worked with just about everybody: Sam Cooke, Dionne Warwick, Tom Jones, the Beach Boys, Sonny and Cher. Love cut hit albums, she says – just under other performers’ names. She even sang backup for Elvis Presley’s 1968 song “If I Can Dream.”

In the 1980s, Love went solo but found it hard to make the leap from background to foreground. She cleaned houses for a time to earn money. A move to New York, however, helped her career.

She got a break in the late ’80s, albeit an acting one. The casting director for the 1987 film “Lethal Weapon” was a fan, and Love was cast as Trish Murtaugh, the wife of Danny Glover’s character. She didn’t even audition.

“I couldn’t hardly talk when they asked me,” she says. Her character is loyal, strong, family-oriented and driven. (In “Lethal Weapon 4,” Trish secretly publishes trashy romance novels.)

Love got another break in the ’90s when she won a lawsuit against Spector for royalties.

But Christmas has always been Love’s big season. For 24 years, she has appeared on “Late Show With David Letterman’s show to sing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”

“David fell in love with the song,” says Love, who will keep the tradition going on Wednesday’s show.

In 1997, she recorded another Christmas song, “All Alone on Christmas,” with the E Street Band; the track is featured in the movies “Home Alone 2” and the more recent “Love Actually.” In 2007, Love released an album called “It’s Christmas, of Course.”

Today, Love is a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. She also is an author, writing her autobiography in 1998. And she is one of 12 musicians nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for 2010.

“Everything in the right time,” she says.

But she is still a minister’s daughter.

“I celebrate Christmas because of Jesus’ birthday,” Love says. During the holidays, she volunteers at a shelter feeding the hungry, and she sings to sick children at a hospital.

“I’m always a believer that you have to give something back,” she says.