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.

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.