The Sound of Christmas

Christmas songs are great. Not all of them, obviously. I never need or want to hear Mariah Carey again. I don't want her to sing normal songs, and I especially don't want to hear that all she wants for Christmas is Me. That thought just makes me feel ill.

Just so you know, here are my top 5 favourite Christmas songs. It's not really a very exciting list, and it contains few surprises. In reverse order:

5. Just Like Christmas - Low
4. O Come, O Come Emmanuel - Belle and Sebastian
3. I Believe in Father Christmas - Greg Lake
2. Stop the Cavalry - Jona Lewie
1. Fairytale of New York - The Pogues

Clearly I'm just trying to look cool with nos 5 and 4 there. In reality they should have been Chris DeBurgh's A Spaceman Came Travelling and East 17's Stay. Not really. Or double bluff?...

I'm always on the lookout for good new Christmas songs. Or good covers of old Christmas songs. Occasionally a whole album comes along at once (eg the XFM It's a Cool, Cool Christmas album from way back in 2000). And sometimes a great song will just turn up all alone, like Badly Drawn Boy's Donna and Blitzen.

Today I found a new album with a whole load of new songs to add to my Christmas jukebox. It's a compilation called Maybe This Christmas Tree and features a fair variety of artists. Some of whom I know (eg Death Cab for Cutie, Lisa Loeb) and some of whom I've never encountered (eg Jars of Clay, Copeland). Some of the songs are covers, some are songs I don't know - either new songs or covers of songs I don't know. And some are better than others.

Highlights? #1 Tom McRae covering Wonderful Christmastime in the style of someone who is having the most miserable holiday of their life. #2 Pilate covering Fairytale of NY. Now, personally, I think this is one song where nobody will ever better the original. However, this is a pretty decent effort, capturing the mood of the song in exactly the way that Ronan Keating didn't. More downbeat than the original, without the tradional Irish musical jaunty background that featured the first time around. It's a great version, and worth tracking down.

I'm sure there must be some other great Christmas albums or songs out there that I might have missed. Anyone got any favourites that I might not have come across?

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Update
I have just found that the new album I have is actually the third in an apparently annual series. It follows Maybe this Christmas and Maybe this Christmas Too. One, Too, Tree. See what they've done there?