My list of Christmas albums often changes from year to year.
Here’s my top five in Dec 2025.
Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas 13 traditional sacred hymns. Angels We Have Heard on High, Hark the Herald Angel, O Holy Night, The First Noel, God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman etc.
Anne Murray - What a Wonderful Christmas 2001 28 Christmas Songs. Silver Bells, Winter Wonderland, I’ll be Home for Christmas, Little Drummer Boy, Joy to the World etc.
Mantovani Christmas 30 Christmas songs. Many are instrumental arrangements.
There are several reissues under similar titles.
Alan Jackson - Let It Be Christmas (2002)
11 popular Christmas songs with country arrangements.
Dean Martin Christmas Album nice versions of Blue Christmas, Let it Snow, Jingle Bells, White Christmas, Winter Wonderland
David Benoit - Remembering Christmas: this jazz album has several Vince Guaraldi pieces on it, which makes it a keeper.
Andy Williams Christmas Album - a sixties album that holds up well.
Wynton Marsalis - Baroque Music for Trumpets: not really Christmas music, per se, but a master class in baroque trumpet that seems to work in a Christmas rotation.
I just saw El Vez’s Merry MeX-mas show (“Let’s put the X back in X-mas and the God back in Godzilla!”) at the Casbah in San Diego last night so that covers four albums:
And number 5…
one of the first ones I start playing the day after Thanksgiving.
Christmas Rocks - the Brian Setzer Orchestra
An Irish Christmas - Moya Brennan
We Three Kings - The Roches
A Midwinter Night’s Dream - Loreena McKennitt
and a stack that all have the name Robert Shaw in there: Chorale, Orchestra, etc.
I dusted off my Celtic Woman A Christmas Celebration.
The luck of the Irish captured lightning in a bottle. AFAIK none of these women had performed together. They were brought together and their harmonies were magical.
I pretty much only listen to one Christmas album faithfully each year - the 1955 Elvis Christmas Album recorded at Graceland. I’m not even a huge Elvis fan, but my mom was. That album evokes so many memories of pretty much every Christmas season of my childhood. It also doesn’t hurt that Elvis’s voice was in peak form at that time.
I finally played some Christmas music today while making treats for tomorrow.
Alligator Records Christmas (various blues artists)
Christmas Guitars (various artists - this was probably the first Christmas CD I ever bought, back in the late 80s. It was put together as a fundraiser for the Coalition Against Homelessness.)
Harry Connick’s Christmas album.
I know that’s only three but that’s all I listened to.
We heard “Fairytale of New York” on the radio, and my wife said (seriously) “Lovely song”
and last night BBC had a “making of” for it. Apparently, Matt Dillon - of Irish descent and a big fan of the Pogues - not being drunk was able to moderate between the beer-dinking cops (“The NYPD Choir”) and the usually drunk Pogues and get the video shot.
Now it’s Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector is the only Xmas album I ever listen to all the way through.
My other must-hears for this day and night are Andy Williams’ “Do You Hear What I Hear”, “Joseph, Better You Than Me” by the Killers, “Christmas Must Be Something More” by Taylor Swift, “You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch” by Thurl Ravenscroft, and Patton Oswalt’s standup routine about the song “Christmas Shoes”.
