At this time of year, holiday music is like James Corden in 2019: ubiquitous and terrible. I don’t pretend my own taste in carols is superior to the norm, but I do know what my ears want to hear in December. My personal canon of Christmas albums would have to include the following 10 recordings.
• Bing Crosby, Merry Christmas
key tracks: “Mele Kalikimaka,” “Christmas in Killarney”
My parents owned Bing’s perennial holiday fave on vinyl. I of course preferred the kitschiest numbers, especially the ones with the Andrews Sisters on backing vocals.
• Sandi Patty, Christmas: The Gift Goes On
key track: “The Gift Goes On”
• Amy Grant, A Christmas Album
key tracks: “Tennessee Christmas,” “Emmanuel”
For its annual Christmas spectacular, the evangelical megachurch my family attended in the 1980s and ‘90s often plundered the yuletide output of Christian pop stars such as Patty and Grant (until, that is, those singers fell from Southern Baptist favor for the sins of getting divorced and releasing secular filth, respectively).
During one year’s show, the church choir and praise team sang Grant’s “Emmanuel”—an absolute banger—while a group of about half a dozen women and one obviously closeted gay man did choreo that I can only describe as rhythmic sign language. They all wore white gloves like Mickey Mouse and had an air of doing something very serious and important and not at all the funniest thing I had ever seen.
• John Denver and the Muppets, A Christmas Together
key tracks: “Twelve Days of Christmas,” “A Baby Just Like You”
When we’d go to celebrate Christmas with my maternal grandparents, who lived on the other side of Arkansas, my mom would insist that we only listen to holiday music for the entire 4-hour drive there and the entire 4-hour drive back a couple days later. The Muppets/John Denver CD was my favorite in the rotation. And not only because “A Baby Just Like You” contains the line “Merry Christmas, little Zachary.”
• Natalie Cole, Holly & Ivy
key track: “No More Blue Christmas’”
Natalie sings, “No more blue Christmases,” but the track listing spells and punctuates that last word like so: Christmas’. She might have been unforgettable but her copyediting was unacceptable.
• Harry Connick, Jr., When My Heart Finds Christmas
Fourteen-year-old me had a thing for Harry Connick, Jr. I couldn’t tell you much today about the music on this one but I could draw from memory the album art, particularly a black-and-white photo spread in the lyric booklet showing a handsome, approachably masculine Harry outdoors with a freshly felled evergreen and a dog. Merry Christmas, little Zachary indeed.
• A Motown Christmas Gift
key tracks: “A Warm Little Home on a Hill,” Stevie Wonder; “My Favorite Things,” the Supremes
Another car-ride-to-the-grandparents staple. Other members of the family would complain that “My Favorite Things,” from The Sound of Music, hardly counts as a Christmas carol. But at that point I’d be like, Anything is better than another rendition of the godforsaken “Little Drummer Boy.”
• Frank Sinatra, A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra
key track: “The Christmas Waltz”
I feel like you can hear in Sinatra’s voice that he doesn’t go for all this holly-jolly crap, and I for one appreciate that.
• Barbra Streisand, A Christmas Album
key tracks: “Jingle Bells?”, “My Favorite Things”
My various loved ones find Streisand’s version of “Jingle Bells” so irritating—she races through it and then makes several jingle-jangle sounds for a while (“Juh-juh-juh, juh-juh-juh-jingle bells! Juh-juh-juh, juh-juh-juh-jangle bells!” goes one refrain)—that I’m only allowed to play the song in communal areas precisely one time per holiday season.
• Rent: Original Broadway Cast Recording, disc 1
key tracks: “Christmas Bells,” “La Vie Boheme”
Viva la vie bohème!
Indirect Objects 
