 | Harry for the Holidays by Harry Connick Jr.
Buy new: $7.99 / Used from: $1.00 Mood: Upbeat and swingy! The one we always play on the night we put up the tree. Diverse, funny, hard to dislike. You got your swing tunes, your spooky tunes, your soul song, your country song...
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 | Happy Holidays-I Love the Winter Weather by Jo Stafford
Buy new: $13.99 / Used from: $15.25 Mood: the "Ozzie and Harriet" 1950s. Wonderful, honey-voiced Jo Stafford sings both Christmas songs and winter songs on this fantastic collection, which for me evokes the fabulous fifties. Kids in the parlor, old decorations and tinsel, crackling fire and the scent of gingerbread. (So why is Jo reading George Bernard Shaw on the cover?)
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 | Sacred Songs
Buy new: $14.99 / Used from: $7.89 Mood: sacred and solemn, female voice. The beautiful Renee treats every song with love and precision, moving from Bach to Bernstein, hitting every mood. I play it now and again during the year, but it's best at Christmas.
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 | Peanuts: A Charlie Brown Christmas by Charles M. Schulz
Buy new: $10.77 / Used from: $4.98 Mood: light jazz and snowfall. Maybe my favorite Christmas record of all time. You simply cannot beat this album's light touch, its lovely brushes-on-drums corner booth jazz, and its blend of sophistication and childlike humor. The first Christmas disc we play every year.
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 | Mixed Nuts Soundtrack by Various
Buy new: $49.98 / Used from: $14.99 Mood: Christmas movie soundtrack. Hard to beat this eclectic mix on the holidays--unfortunately out of print now.
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 | A Partridge Family Christmas Card by The Partridge Family
Buy new: $6.98 / Used from: $2.48 Mood: 1970s Cheese. Yes, you can find a lot of cheesy 70s Christmas records out there, but this one is actually good! My wife had this in her collection when I met her, and I played it for the first time with great trepidation, not having been a PF fan. But it really is a fun one.
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 | The Best of Bing Crosby - The Christmas Collection: 20th Century Masters by Bing Crosby
Buy new: $8.97 / Used from: $3.94 Mood: Bing Crosby. Yes, he is his own mood, isn't he? This set has the virtue of being shorter than some of the more exhaustive collections out there, yet it also gathers up many of the best early and later tracks from his catalog (like "That Christmas Feeling," one of my faves that almost never shows up on other collections). Only quibble: they included his annoying version of "Rudolph."
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 | Christmas Star
Buy new: $10.99 / Used from: $6.00 Mood: choral. I had a hard time selecting from the Cambridge Singer's catalog of Christmas discs, since they're all wonderful and we play them all. But I think this one has the best soothing holiday ambience. Lush voices, excellent song selection, no annoying vibrato. Perfection.
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