🎄 Holidays! List some new and/or favorite Holiday albums!

[Rudy]

We've talked the A&M holiday music repertoire to death here already (click the button in our forum listings to see our past discussions), so I'd like to open up a bit of a discussion to cover Xmas and other holiday songs (what am I doing New Year's Eve, anyway??) and albums that we are all fond of, mainly in the interest of discovering some new and old favorites some of us may not have heard yet.

If you've discovered something new over the past year or two, whether it's a new recording or a new reissue of a classic, we'd love to hear about it!

Lists posted elsewhere are also welcome. In fact, I found a list today that I will be exploring when I get a chance: The 10 best pieces of classical Christmas music » .

I pretty much play the music only one or two days out of the year, so I like to make those hours count.

 

[Bobberman]

I like the Vince guraldi "Charlie brown christmas" soundtrack and for a bit of Orchestral flair i Enjoy Arthur Fiedler's Boston pops orchestra's christmas album. Along with a few Mannheim Steamroller Christmas albums. And some Vintage Reader's Digest Christmas Comps. So my christmas music tastes Widely vary.

 

[Acapulco 1922]

I like the Boston Pops/Fiedler Christmas one, too --- the 1971 Polydor album with the faux foil "gift wrap" cover (NOT the 1962, RCA album with the Santa artwork...I just love "Evening at Pops"-era Fiedler anyway; he'd gotten a new producer then -Thomas Mowrey- whom, went on to win Grammys for producing opera recordings for DG and, actually, had had a role in developing Quad in 1969). He hyped up the arrangements and gotten Fiedler beyond the Leroy Anderson kitsch of the '50s.
Another one: the (ubiquitous) JULIE ANDREWS CHRISTMAS TREASURE album *every* Firestone garage gave out a zillion copies of in the late '60s(!).

 

[DeeInKY]

I also like A Charlie Brown Christmas. Another one I like is Chet Atkins' East Tennessee Christmas.

(Autocorrect kept trying to say "Charles Brown" - I guess that's the formal version.

 

[Rudy]

I've given part of the Lou Rawls Christmas album on Capitol a spin over the past week or so, and it seems pretty good. Rawls puts his spin on the tunes, so it could be an acquired taste for some.



One of these tracks appeared on this Capitol compilation we had in the house when I was a young 'un:

I found a CD of this one, but some of the tunes on it are quite hokey, nothing I'd ever want to listen to again. There are a few good ones among them.

 

[Mike Blakesley]

My Christmas album tastes are such that new stuff is hard for me to get into. That's one area of music that I'm hopelessly stuck in the past. I think the newest Christmas item in my collection is the single, "The Best Christmas" by Christopher Cross from a few years back -- I really like that one, it puts a lump in my throat.

For albums, I think my most recent favorite is the Polar Express soundtrack which is a nice mix of old and new music. The song "Believe" is a nice Josh Groban ballad, and the choral number "Spirit of the Season" is a winner.

Beyond that.... the usual suspects such as Herb, Something Festive, Arthur Fiedler, Carpenters, and selected tracks by Trans Siberian Orchestra (I can't get completely into their concept albums, too bombastic for my tastes, but "Wizards in Winter" is a great song, as is "Appalachian Snowfall."

 

[Rudy]

My Christmas album tastes are such that new stuff is hard for me to get into.

This. Definitely this.

Other than just a small handful of records, there are very few in the past 20 years I could ever listen to. The local Mexican restaurant had some holiday station playing the last time we visited, and my daughter (who also dislikes most "modern" music) was cringing most of the time. They had a mix of modern songs with just a small number of classics (which would be something 25+ years old). Anything newer I have liked has usually been somewhat obscure, or unusual enough that I enjoy it for that reason.

I will say that I still enjoy the Brian Setzer Orchestra, and he put out a new CD last year, his third holiday recording. His holiday tours are also still going strong after all these years--he puts on a fun show, and definitely gets the audience into the holiday spirit. I don't even know if he makes money on these gigs--touring with that many musicians can cost a small fortune. Based on all the crap that's been released in recent decades, the BSO is one bright spot among them all.

Mainly what I refer to as "new" would be older releases which are new to me. Reissues, or recordings I've just discovered. And even so, outside of a sporadic listen, I tend to play the music only one or two days out of the year. And given my buying habits as of late, it'd likely be a vinyl release, or something in hi-res.

 

[DeeInKY]

For some reason, the station I was listening to earlier played Bob and Doug McKenzie's 12 Days of Christmas. I hadn't heard that in so long that I had forgotten about it. Wouldn't call it a favorite but it was something different.

 

[Harry]

Other than the new Mannheim Steamroller vinyl that I mentioned in another thread (which I don't actually have yet - Santa's bringing it), there is one "new-to-me" Christmas song that I've discovered this year - it's "'Twas The Night Before Christmas", a song set to the poem by Clement Clark Moore that was written by Ken Darby, arranged by Harry Simeone, and most popularly performed by Fred Waring & The Pennsylvanians.

I don't know why this song has escaped me all these years, but it did. I became aware of it when we got our music for this year's Christmas concert in our community's chorus. As it turned out, I owned an album that had the song on it, Harry Simeone's own version, on this album:

That's one of the albums that I acquired from various radio stations over the years, but other than the title track, probably never played.

Our chorus is nowhere near as good as this example on YouTube, but this is the exact arrangement we did. No, we didn't do all of the choreography either.

Those kids are good!

 

[Rudy]

No, we didn't do all of the choreography either.

Awww man, that's the fun part!

(My daughter hates the "dancing" they have to do in choir class, BTW... )

 

[Rudy]

For some reason, the station I was listening to earlier played Bob and Doug McKenzie's 12 Days of Christmas. I hadn't heard that in so long that I had forgotten about it. Wouldn't call it a favorite but it was something different.

Being so close to Canada, it's part of our DNA.

Now I'm in the mood for hockey and back bacon...

I know a few friends whose holiday is not complete until they've heard Cheech & Chong's "Santa Claus and His Old Lady." Magic dust, maaan!

 

[DeeInKY]

Stumbled upon something called Christmas A-Go-Go which contains this:

 

[Acapulco 1922]

Got a new android phone and attempted to make a short demo of my vintage Fiedler/Boston Pops tape playing back --
James Hoover »

 

[Rudy]

Mikey put together a good holiday assortment on his radio show:

AnalogPlanet Radio's WFDU HD2 "Christmas 2016" Show Streams Now! »

Been meaning to give it a play, but can only hope it's still available on Soundcloud next year when I get to playing the holiday discs again.

 

[Rudy]

An interesting tidbit. What are the best-selling Christmas albums? One of my pals wrote about this a couple of weeks ago:

The best-selling Christmas records of all-time »