The tree is up and decorated pretty, but it’s not quite right. Cookies and candies are baked and delicious, but they’re not quite right. Christmas music is playing, and Christmas programs are airing, and the mall is full of Christmas shoppers buying Christmas presents and waiting in line to have their Christmas children photographed with Santa Claus. It’s just as festive and illuminated as it ever was. And it’s not quite right.

Having spent the better part of a month — longer, frankly, than I expected to — listening to unfamiliar Christmas albums, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a fair amount of a gold out there amidst the dross. I generally tried to avoid listening to anything that I had reason to think would be a bad experience, and wasn’t always successful. But on the whole, I’m kind of surprised at how many of the albums I picked sort of randomly turned out to be pretty good.

I have conflicting views on instrumentals. On the one hand, they can be haunting and beautiful, like the entries in Ron Korb and Donald Quan’s Seasons. But on the other hand, like that same album, they tend not to grab my attention. I wonder if they affect me on some subconscious level, but instrumental albums always seem shorter than vocal ones, probably because I stop really paying attention.

So far, all of the albums I’ve reviewed have been of the single-artist variety, but the Christmas music market is dominated by compilations. I’ve been trying to ignore them — in the age of iTunes and mp3 downloads, they’re kind of pointless — but I stumbled upon 2004′s Maybe This Christmas Tree (it’s a pun: it’s the third album in the Maybe This Christmas series), and the lineup caught my attention. I don’t normally go for rock and roll carols, but what the hey? It’s got all your favorite slightly underground acts from the early twenty-first century.