While reading these brief reviews please keep in mind that I’m a grumpy old man who’s heard all the Christmas music and you might love what I hate and vice versa and that’s totally cool.
Steeleye Span - Winter (2009)
Another case of “I wish they’d done their seasonal album earlier in their career”. This 2009 release is far from peak Steeleye and it pains me to have an album by one of my favorite folk groups in such light rotation. There are still some nice moments, but it doesn’t work for me as a whole.
Luckily Maddy Prior has produced, with the Carnival Band and others, a good deal of other seasonal work that we play throughout the yuletide
.
Emily Hall - My Only Wish This Year
Acoustic Christmas covers is pretty much a sub genre of a sub genre at this point. This collection is perfectly fine as seasonal aural wallpaper but the song choices and performances are predictable and by the numbers.
The Christmas Revels: In Celebration of the Winter’s Solstice (1978)
1978 recording from New England holiday favorites. Not the best of the bunch but a decent record of what is essentially an upscale Christmas pageant.
The Decibels - Christmas Moods (2019)
Holiday power-pop all sounds the same to me these days, so this is both the best and worst of it.
Huey "Piano" Smith - 'Twas the Night Before Christmas (1962)
This is a fun album, give it a listen.
Next up some compilations with more hits than misses...
This Warm December: A Brushfire Christmas Vol 2 (2011)
Gift Wrapped (2009)
Holidays Rule (2012)
A Very Special Christmas Vol 2 (1992)
And finally, there’s a lot of music I listen to each year that isn’t available to stream. Some of it came from online sharity sites, some from long out of print records and cassettes I’ve picked up over the years and much of it is in the form of mixes and compilations (shared on the intertubes, my own and ones shared by friends).
3M Seasons Greetings - Background music demo album full of very nice instrumental easy listening tracks.
Various Reader’s Digest LP box sets (Christmas Through the Years, Together at Christmas, Back Home for Christmas and so forth)
K-Tel Orchestra - Disco Christmas Party (1977) / The Mistletoe Disco Band - Christmas Disco 1978 / The Salsoul Orchestra - Christmas Jollies (1976) - Love these kinds of cheesy disco records.
Ernie (Not Bert) - A magical repository of out of print Christmas treasures and oddities.
