Five years ago, Destiny's Child released an album titled Eight Days of Christmas. Exactly what had happened to the missing 96 hours remained unclear, though ignorance of the yuletide calendar was less of an issue than the awfulness of the music. The title track, for example, rewrote the traditional ode to partridges and leaping lords as a celebration of bog-standard consumerism, in which the girls received such presents as "a pair of Chloe shades and a diamond belly ring," "a cropped jacket with dirty-denim jeans" and "the keys to a CLK Mercedes." The result was less Christ-in-a-manger than D-list celebrity in Selfridges: the festive season reduced to flimsy, plastic cliches that would surely be worn out by Boxing Day.
As far as big-league Americans are concerned, this kind of stuff has long been obligatory. The basic recipe — as also evidenced by, say, Christina Aguilera's My Kind of Christmas, which contains a stirring bit of fireside magic titled Xtina's Xmas — is simple enough: stick to the kind of music that has made your name, trowel on the icky sentimentality usually crystallized in seasonal Coca-Cola advertisements, and then watch the money roll in. Unfortunately, even the most godlike talents thereby sound like earthly fools. For example, you'd be forgiven for thinking a James Brown compilation titled Funky Christmas (put to tape between 1966 and 1970 and featuring a song called Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto) would be brilliant. If only: seemingly hacked out during spare studio time, it is woefully fun-free, and really rather embarrassing.
So, what to listen to come Christmas Day? In its 60-ish year history, post-Elvis popular music has rarely got Christmas right. Phil Spector's iconic 1963 album A Christmas Gift to You undoubtedly has its moments, Slade's perennial Merry Xmas Everybody perfectly encapsulates the hard-wrought pleasures of a British Christmas in the 1970s, and there is a case to be made for the usual selections from Wizzard, John and Yoko, the Pogues and — at a push — Wham. But that is largely it, and the small handful of songs that constitute the supposedly classic Christmas pop canon have long been so familiar that they have bred contempt. Besides, with only a few exceptions (such as 2000 Miles, the wonderfully wistful 1983 Pretenders hit whose Christmas references are almost incidental), pop music seems innately restricted to sleighbells and schmaltz. Whether late December is all about the (northern) winter solstice, the birth of Christ or nestling in the bosom of one's kin, there surely ought to be more to it than that.
This year, however, brings a small handful of surprisingly satisfying Christmas albums: records that variously emphasize nostalgia, religious revelation, paganism, wintry melancholy and familial warmth.
Aimee Mann, the Los Angeles-based songwriter best known for her impossibly affecting soundtrack for Magnolia, recently released a 10-track Christmas companion called One More Drifter in the Snow, which partly amounts to an understated protest against the crimes against Christmas perpetrated by the modern music industry. "Whenever I hear a modern Christmas record, the very fact that they tried to modernize it makes me cringe," she says. "There's always somebody trying to go for a new twist. And I don't want a new twist on Christmas. Whatever it is, I want to be able to listen to it next to Johnny Mathis and Peggy Lee and Dean Martin."
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