Mantovani has been dead for thirty years, but like Tupac, he keeps putting out records. As best I can tell, he and his famed orchestra only released two Christmas LPs in his lifetime, but there have been many collections since. I settled on Mantovani Orchestra Performs Christmas Classics primarily because it was a manageable length. A few of these tracks — “I Saw Three Ships” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” — were part of the annual Christmas mixtape that defined my childhood, but the rest are new to me.

Bethany McCade is not a star. In fact, she’s not even on the map. She’s a singer and actress trying to make her mark in Houston, Texas, and A Little Christmas is her second album. Despite all the obstacles a person faces when trying to produce music on their own — finances, technology, distribution to name a few — she’s managed to put out a collection of recordings that is vastly superior to any number of releases from household names.

Christie McCarthy’s voice is a little off-putting — it’s in that uncomfortable range where you can’t quite tell if the singer is male or female — but once that confusion is out of the way, it’s easy to enjoy Winter, a collection of familiar, mostly secular Christmas carols (“Silent Night” being the lone sacred hymn).

I don’t know how he did it, but someone Bob Dylan has figured out how to travel through time, and has journeyed back to the 1940s to cut an album with Bing Crosby’s backup singers. Christmas in the Heart has a wonderful old-timey feel. It plays like an old, comfortable sweater of an album from the middle of the twentieth century. I really like the way these songs are arranged.

I have all the respect in the world for Annie Lennox and her illustrious pop music career, but this is one of the worst Christmas albums I’ve ever heard. Right off the bat, it’s tinny and cold, replete with electric keyboard and strings. Without the vocals, this would basically be a Yanni album, but then Lennox starts singing and everything gets worse. She is in terrible vocal form on this album, and there’s nothing the various, constant filtering and “Autotuning” can do to rescue her.

I listened to Over the Rhine’s Snow Angels on the advice of Kim Long. To put it as simply as I can, this is a depressing album. It is sick with virulent, contagious melancholy. One must be very careful when exposed to this kind of music not to be overcome and stay in bed for a week. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Not all of the songs are like that, but this is far from a celebratory record. It ain’t party music.

Robin Bullock is an impressive guitar player, and his album A Guitar for Christmas delivers exactly what it promises: Christmas music played on the guitar. I’m not sure if it’s accurate to say the songs are “acoustic” — there’s definitely some reverb — but no one’s going to confuse this with Jimi Hendrix.

Singer Cilette Swann of the group Gypsy Soul has a voice kind of like Jewel (when she’s using her round voice, not her flat voice), and she put it to pretty good use on Sacred, the band’s entry in the holiday music sweepstakes. That’s not to say that I love Swann’s singing style — she sometimes goes overboard with the embellishments — but her voice is pretty, and that certainly helps.