Christmas can be like that. 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.

You hear it in the weeks leading up to the big day. “I’m not feeling it yet,” as if Christmas were a drug. If you find yourself thinking this, you might try to jump start things by diving into shopping or decorating or putting on some Nat King Cole. It probably even works while you’re in the middle of it, but then you step back and … eh. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” you think. “I just don’t have the Christmas spirit.”

The Christmas Spirit: that sly, unpredictably fickle demon that possesses us easily as children, but loses interest once we’re old enough to buy things for ourselves. And friends and coworkers are of little help — confess to an absence of Christmas Spirit, and you will henceforth be dubbed a Grinch. So not only do you have to cope with that cold, spiritless feeling, as a bonus you get to feel guilty about it.

The bitter emptiness of Christmas.

There aren’t many holidays that expect you to not only feel a certain way, but demonstrate it publicly. Thanksgiving, of course, comes with a mandate that you express gratitude, but this is pretty easy to fake if all you want to do is eat. Valentine’s Day may unpleasantly remind you of your loneliness if you’re not part of a couple, but at least you’re not expected to participate. Easter doesn’t play nearly as large a role in our culture as Christmas does.

The closest parallel might be the Fourth of July. It’s not as culturally significant an occasion as Christmas, but it does come with a spirit: Patriotism. On July Fourth, you are expected to feel and express all kinds of pride and awe about our nation, culminating in a fireworks display that should leave you feeling amazed at your great fortune at being a citizen of these United States. Even if you don’t do all the standard activities, you probably take a moment to consider what it all means.

The Fourth of July is an easy holiday to get through. Other than pyrotechnics experts, no one worries about “getting it right” on the Fourth. No one worries over how they’re not feeling as patriotic as they should be. No one thinks back to the Independence Days of their childhood and wistfully remarks that it’s not like how it used to be. Extended family are less likely to put up a fuss about you skipping the barbecue. Friends don’t worry about you if they learn that you don’t have plans for the night. It is a pressure-free holiday. It’s upsetting for pets, but people enjoy it every year. It’s easy, but it’s also still somehow kind of special.

Why can’t Christmas be like that?

For starters, Christmas isn’t a day; it’s a month-long festival that runs through New Year’s. It’s the Christmas Season. Some people find this overwhelming, but it can also be liberating. It means you can stop worrying about frantically getting all of your ducks in a row so that all you have to do on Christmas morning is take perfect photographs. Instead, take note: Christmas is happening right now. This is it. We’re in the middle of it. Of course, there’s no way a person can function at a maximum level of festiveness for an entire month, and once you realize this, you can take a deep breath and enjoy it. If you feel pressured, try distributing that pressure across several days (or weeks). Christmas Day will come and go like a thief in the night. If you want your Christmas to be memorable, don’t wait until December 25th to start making memories.

But … what if you want to start celebrating the week after Thanksgiving, and you just don’t have that old Christmas Spirit? I don’t have an easy answer for that. If you’re religious, maybe you’ll find more power in the holiday by focusing on the birth of Jesus and what that means to you. Certainly there’s no shortage of believers who will tell you that this is the answer, and maybe it is. But for many of us, Christmas hasn’t lost its luster because its grown too secular; it’s lost its luster because we’ve grown too old.

Christmas (as most of us know it) is a children’s holiday, and we’re too stubborn and deluded to accept it. In fact, I’m sure nothing rejuvenates an adult’s long forgotten Christmas joy so much as becoming a parent and introducing the holiday to their children. But no matter how many children and grandchildren you have, you can never get back the gleeful anticipation of lying on the floor next to the tree and shaking wrapped gifts, or the mad, unhinged thrill over ripping open those gifts and learning which of your predictions were correct.

You can’t get back the childlike pleasure of eating holiday candy because you know what happens if you eat too much holiday candy.

You can’t get back the fun of listening to Christmas music because you’ve been hearing these same songs for at least thirty years, and you’re kind of getting sick of them.

You can’t get back the comfort of trusting that Santa Claus knew you’d been good all year.

Maybe the most wrongheaded thing about the way we celebrate Christmas is thinking of it as a season of joy. It is that, but it’s not only that. Of course we know that it’s a difficult time of year for people that are lonely or have lost a loved one. It’s hard if you’re unemployed and down on your luck. It’s hard for all the obvious reasons, but even the most fortunate among us can get the Christmas Blues. Christmas is a time to try to reconnect with childhood, but there’s nothing wrong with experiencing a little grief that you don’t ever really get to go back and experience it the way you once did.

Christmas should be a time for vigils.

So here’s my Christmas gift to you this year: You have my permission to be sad this Christmas. You’re not a Grinch if someone calls you out for not grinning like an idiot. And if you don’t feel inspired to pull out all the stops this year, by all means don’t. But do take advantage of opportunities to be with family and friends — they may be feeling the same emptiness you are, and God knows misery loves company.

Merry Christmas.

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.

For those of you that didn’t follow along, here’s a quick summary:

The Best

The highest possible rating was five stars, but none of the albums I reviewed got higher than four. So they may not be all-time classics, but these were, in my opinion, the best albums I stumbled across over the last month.

Dave Brubeck, A Dave Brubeck Christmas
Mantovani, Mantovani Orchestra Performs Christmas Classics
Mindy Smith, My Holiday

The Next Best

The next list includes the albums that received three and a half stars.

John Denver, A Rocky Mountain Christmas
Ron Korb and Donald Quan, Seasons
Bethany McCade, A Little Christmas
Over the Rhine, Snow Angels
Kim Robertson, Christmas Lullaby

The rest of the albums are more hit-and-miss, though you will find at least one or two moderately good songs on all but the Annie Lennox abomination, A Christmas Cornucopia, which was the worst album I reviewed. So here’s a playlist that includes the best tracks from all of the albums I reviewed, except that one because the whole thing is terrible.

1. “O Come O Come Emmanuel”, Synergy Brass Quartet
2. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, Gypsy Soul
3. “The First Noel”, Robin Bullock
4. “Christmas Time Is Here”, Bethany McCade
5. “We Three Kings”, Ron Korb and Donald Quan
6. “Santa Will Find You”, Mindy Smith
7. “Christmas For Cowboys”, Jars of Clay
8. “I Saw Three Ships”, Mantovani
9. “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”, Lena Horne
10. “Mele Kalikimaka”, Heather Henry
11. “Mistletoe and Holly”, Christie McCarthy
12. “Here Comes Santa Claus”, Bob Dylan
13. “Here It Is”, Over the Rhine
14. “Winter Wonderland”, Dave Brubeck
15. “Riu Riu Chiu”, Quattrottave
16. “What Child Is This”, John Denver
17. “In The Bleak Midwinter”, Kim Robertson
18. “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town”, The Ray Conniff Singers
19. “Angels In The Snow”, David Arkenstone
20. “White Christmas”, Shelby Lynne
21. “Auld Lang Syne”, James Taylor

I hope you enjoy the tunes. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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.

This is a good album though. It could be described as new age, I suppose, but it’s peaceful and melancholy. It’s basically piano and gentle woodwinds (I assume Korb plays one and Quan plays the other). “We Three Kings” is especially good, and I like hearing “The Huron Carol” now and then. There’s a misty-eyedness to even the most cheerful songs on the album, but the music isn’t depressing. It’s the kind of album you play on Christmas Night, when your heart is a little heavy with the knowledge that the holiday is mere hours from being out of your life for another year.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

And that’s that.

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.

Sadly and strangely, I think this is a little too hipster for me, and I live in Portland! For starters, you’ve got covers of both Lennon’s (Polyphonic Spree) and McCartney’s (Tom McRae) Christmas offerings. McRae actually manages to improve on Sir Paul’s version — the easiest feat ever — by basically just mumbling through it. Jars of Clay does a graceful cover of “Christmas for Cowboys”, and the Ravonettes do a nice job on “The Christmas Song” (which is not “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”).

The rest of the album isn’t as strong. Ivy is my favorite band on this album, but I don’t care for their “Christmastime Is Here”, and “Fairytale of New York” (Pilate) is flat out gross. And I’m already on record detesting “Baby It’s Cold Outside”, sleazily handled by Royal Crown Revue. Death Cab for Cutie and Pedro the Lion acquit themselves nicely, but not memorably. My main problem is that I don’t think I’d want to listen to most of these songs even if they had nothing to do with Christmas. Add in that extra burden of being “holiday” music, and the album falls short.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Finally, a Christmas album for fans of Garden State!

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.

Everything on the album is majestic. Sometimes that quality doesn’t really fit, like on “The Holly and the Ivy”, a song that was never meant to be sung with such bombast. And over time, you might get the feeling that you’re celebrating Christmas in an Italian restaurant. But there’s no denying the quality of the musicianship. Sometimes you want mellow and sometimes you want enough sound to fill the Hollywood Bowl. This album is for when you need the latter. Mantovani is usually identified with easy listening, but this is not elevator music. It is symphonic, and it is wonderful.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I suspect you’ll get more or less the same impact from any of the other Mantovani Christmas collections, depending on how much time you want to spend with the orchestra.

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.

What makes A Little Christmas work? Well, it’s clearly a labor of love. There’s nothing crass about it. The song list is eclectic, including several titles that were new to me. McCade seems to be throwing the kitchen sink at it instrumentally, and that sometimes overwhelms her voice, which is smallish and a little childlike. The arrangements are jaunty and fun . “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” — which is rapidly becoming a standard on jazz vocal albums like this — is usually pretty lugubrious, but McCade’s interpretation is downright snappy.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

I don’t know if a successful singing career is in the cards for Bethany McCade, but she handles Christmas quite nicely.

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).

The production is professional and restrained, although I’m not completely sure how to categorize the style — it’s sort of like jazz, but there’s a prominent electric guitar on all of the numbers. In any case, despite its rock and roll elements, the album is very laid back. I’d probably describe it as soporific if McCarthy had a more conventional voice. But it works, even on sprightly tunes like “Mistletoe and Holly”, which might be the only song on the album that hasn’t been done to death by everyone else.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The songs may be familiar, but they sound a little different when McCarthy sings them.

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.

Unfortunately, Dylan didn’t find a way to send his voice back in time to an era when it was merely bad. He has to strain to sing anything on this album. Of course, Dylan’s gifts have always been his songwriting rather than his crooning, which is why it’s kind of disappointing that none of these songs are originals. If it weren’t Dylan, you’d never put up with this singing, and I’m not convinced you should put up with it from him in this case. Bob seems to be enjoying himself, and it is a fun record. But I can’t imagine it holding up to repeated listening.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Once the shock of Bob Dylan singing Christmas carols wears off, it’s just an old guy with no voice getting on your nerves.