Christmas

With five discs and 100 tracks, this holiday set is expansive and interesting. Some of the sides will be familiar to nearly everyone – classics like Bing Crosby's version of “White Christmas” and Perry Como's “Winter Wonderland” pop up in the stores and all over the radio dial during the season’s festivities – but other selections here are fairly rare and give things a depth that a lot of holiday collections don’t reach…

Emmylou Harris is an artist with the rare sort of voice that communicates an honest and firmly grounded humanity while possessing a crystalline purity that verges on the angelic. In short, she was a singer born to make a great Christmas album, and in 1979 she did just that with Light of the Stable, in which she fused the high-lonesome traditional sound she'd been exploring on Roses in the Snow and Blue Kentucky Girl with songs that honored the spiritual and emotional roots of the holiday season…

In case you've lost track (or were never keeping track), this is Johnny Mathis' sixth newly recorded Christmas album following Merry Christmas (1958), The Sound of Christmas (1963), Give Me Your Love for Christmas (1969), For Christmas (1984), and Christmas Eve With Johnny Mathis (1986)…

Elton John's Christmas Party is a Christmas-themed compilation album from British singer-songwriter Elton John. It features his 1973 Christmas single, "Step into Christmas", and a new duet with Joss Stone, "Calling It Christmas". According to John's introduction in the liner notes, as opposed to doing an album of his versions of already famous songs, he chose to do a compilation with some of his favorite holiday songs by other artists…

Dagmar Pecková's new Christmas album: 30 carols and songs from Bohemia, Moravia and other European regions.
The highly acclaimed Christmas album Nativitas is now joined by a new festive album, bearing the title "Exaltatio". While in Colloquial Latin the word means "exaltation" and "elation", in Christian theology it has a more profound connotation: "elevation"…

Christmas in September, the brand new single from Irish folk singer Heidi Talbot is a beautiful modern day Christmas song. Written by Boo Hewerdine and produced by John McCusker, the song was recorded in Talbot's own studio in the Scottish Borders countryside and finished in various hotel rooms across America. Christmas in September features Richard Bennet (Mark Knopfler, Neil Diamond), Glenn Worf (Willie Nelson, Tammy Wynette), Nigel Hitchcock (Tom Jones, Robbie Williams), John McCusker, Phil Cunningham, James Mackintosh and Adam Holmes…