Every year from 1963 through 1969 the Beatles made a Christmas recording — a little singing, a little talking — for members of the official Beatles fan club. The recordings were collected on an album offered to members in 1970, and again in 1971.
Have these Christmas recordings ever been offered for sale legally since then?
When the Beatle Anthologies came out in the mid 90’s, they released CD singles of the “new” Beatles’ songs, Real Love and Free as a Bird. On one of those
CD singles you will find some of the Christmas stuff.
I don’t know if these CD singles are hard to find, good luck.
I had the album (sold it for a tidy profit). The singles and the album are probly availible on E-bay. They have never been re-released on CD. The version that showed up on the anthology CD was an abbreviated version of the 1965 single.
The track that appeared on the “Free as a Bird” CD single was actually a full-length version of the song from the 1967 Christmas message, “Christmas Time Is Here Again.” On the original message, snippets of the song alternated with various spoken word routines, only one of which is included here, along with some overdubbed greetings from the previous year.
“Christmastime Is Here Again” is from the 1967 recording, not the 1965. </nitpick>
If the OP is just looking for downloads of the Christmas tracks, they’re easily found on the Web. Very funny stuff.
The individual flexidiscs have been pirated endlessly since the days of the very first vinyl bootlegs, in horrible sound, right up to CD bootlegs of the actual discs, declicked and denoised, with bonus outtakes from some of those sessions. But no, they have never been officially re-released.
I have a copy of a disc released by Parlophone and the “Official Beatles Fan Club of Great Britain” which has the '63-'69 messages along with a few outtake tracks. The disc was intended for broadcasters and not for sale to the public, of course the material has turned up all over the place in various bootlegs.
Murcielago, what you have is a bootleg. It was never issued by Parlophone, and the Apple label Fan Club issue never had any outtakes.