The top 100 Christmas records of all time

This is Records.Christmas’s take on the top 100 Christmas records of all time. These are our favourites out of all the albums we’ve listened to, pondered, researched and reviewed over the years, listed by review score – where 10 means the very best albums in history, and so on. Within each category, the order is random, and clicking each title takes you to the review of that album.

The eagle-eyed of you will have noticed that there are not 100 albums on there. In fact, as of writing this, there’s only just about three quarters of that number. However, new album reviews are added automatically, and we’re building up to a number close to if not precisely one hundred.

10 points – The best of the top 100 Christmas records

• Willie Colón – Asalto Navideño

  Asalto Navideño infused the newest salsa sounds with the traditional parranda traditions of Puerto Rico, and transformed salsa itself in the process. That it's also a fantastic piece of music with huge sing-along dance hits is probably not accidental.


• Mahalia Jackson – Silent Night: Songs for Christmas

  Mahalia Jackson declaims Christmas like a pastor, giving every word meaning like a poet, singing as if supported by an inner choir of trumpeting angels. And yet what she does is completely unique, even in relation to other gospel singers. Without shouting or breaking into a sweat, this is nevertheless probably the Christmas album with the most holy energy burning within.


• June Christy – This Time Of Year

  I have no hesitation naming June Christy's This Time Of Year the greatest Christmas album of all time. The massive ambition of writing ten lyrical and melodic masterpieces is matched by fantastic arrangements and beautiful performances from all concerned. This is the full range of grown-up Christmas experience condensed into one truly singular package.


• Eraserheads – Fruitcake

  This clever, funny and delightful album may just be the best Christmas record of the past half-century. It manages to be both avant-garde and perfect three-minute pop, epic in scale and intimate in detail, beautiful and abrasive, polished and full of uncanny subtext, both loving Christmas and skewering its deficiencies. It truly expands what the holiday makes possible.


• Ella Fitzgerald – Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas

  The Cover of Ella Fitzgerald's Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas is of an orange unicorn holding a flower. A unique image for a unique artist, whose ability to distill fantastic essence from popular song remains unchallenged.


• Doris Day – The Doris Day Christmas Album

  It's ironic that Doris Day, who spent much of her life using her considerable acting skills to live up to an infantalised ideal of womanhood, would be the one to produce the most adult Chistmas album of standards ever. This is subtle, complex, full of amorousness and despair, and a masterfully sung and produced album like few others.


• A Christmas Gift for You From Philles Records

  No Christmas album has been as deeply mythologised as A Christmas Gift For You From Philles Records, full of notions of Phil Spector's genius and insanity, The Wall of Sound, The Wrecking Crew, Jack Nietzche, ad absurdum. Look beyond that and what you see is a brilliant, amazingly arranged album of outstanding quality that outshines every myth.

9 points – Astoundingly good albums with pride of place in the top 100 Christmas records

• Vince Guaraldi Trio – A Charlie Brown Christmas

  I don't think we foreigners quite understand how important this album and Vince Guaraldi is to Americans. It's one of the best-selling jazz albums ever, yet it's as emotionally complicated as anything. Christmas music can do this perhaps better than any other genre.


• The Ramsey Lewis Trio – Sound of Christmas

  The Ramsey Lewis Trio are fantastic in creating a warm, cheerfully innocent glow around this Christmas record, filling the atmosphere with discovery and curiosity. And that works surprisingly well both in the simple jazz trio first part and the selectively orchestrated second part.


• The Kingston Trio – Last Month of the Year

  The Kingston Trio may be scorned by purists, but their combination of the best of pop and the best of folk make their sound truly unique and perfect for Christmas. They've got a folkie's sense of tradition, a treasury of unusual old songs to pick from and a penchant for unusual instrumentation (yes, that's a bouzouki). But their pop side brings forth complex arrangements, suave production values and an enormous professional sharpness. Brilliant.


• The Carpenters – Christmas Portrait

  Is this the last great Christmas record of the Traditional pop era? To an extent. In a different way, The Carpenters always stood outside easy categorisation, especially when they're this far from soft rock.


• Strictly Parang: The Best of Trinidad Parang

  It's harder to think of a single compilation that better covers parang than the Strictly Parang set. It's an ideal place to start but also is rich enough to serve as a constant standby, and inevitably brings forth that Sorrel-tinged Christmas spirit on every listen.


• Otis Gibbs – Once I Dreamed of Christmas

  Witty, candid and with some killer hooks, Otis Gibbs has put together a passionate and deeply memorable album of Christmas realism. Always on the side of the regular people, it doesn't veer from either the darkness or the special beauty of the season, and it remains a highlight in how to approach Christmas beyond the clichés.


• Louvin Brothers – Christmas With The Louvin Brothers

  The Louvin Brothers were masters of both close harmony and of the album form, inspiring future generations of artists. It's worth thinking of them as the brilliant musicians they were, and not falling into the trap of thinking of them as particuarly simple. Their real, complicated lives inform their real, constructed music.


• Julie Andrews – The Secret of Christmas

  Julie Andrews was in her vocal peak and could really focus on making an amazing record in the early seventies as her acting career had a temporary lull. With all that multi-tracking could offer, this has production care in spades, utterly clean and utterly beautiful. Rarely has a Christmas record been so worked through in every detail. If that's overproduction, let's indulge.


• Duke Pearson – Merry Ole Soul

  Duke Pearson was one of the driving forces in the last great period of Blue Note. He brings all the arranging cleverness and eclectic influences from that era into a Christmas album, playing around with more new ideas in a minute than most Christmas albums get over a whole record. It's pretty awe-inspiring.


• A Music Box Christmas: Enchanting 19th-Century Music Boxes from the Collection of Rita Ford

  The perfection of 19th-century music box technology and 1960s record engineering combine to create an album full of amazingly alive christmas music. Especially considering it's essentially recorded by a robot!

8 points – Great Christmas albums for any collection

• Urbie Green and his All-Stars – A Cool Yuletide

  Who would have expected respected trombonist Urbie Green and the cream of the New York recording world would record a Christmas album in 1954? No-one, and yet the literal all-stars here (including not least Milt Hinton, often considered the greatest double-bass player of all time) create a timeless combination of fine improvisation, perfect musicianship and a truly festive atmosphere.


• Stan Kenton – A Merry Christmas!

  Few intrumental albums – hell, few of any kind of albums – are as inventive and grand as this. Although it runs out of steam a bit at the end, for the Christmas season, it may be just what the doctor ordered.


• Rotary Connection – Peace

  Sometimes the best thing a Christmas album can be, in a sea of seasonal clichés, is interesting. Peace by Rotary Connection is by turns poignant, overwrought, funny, beautifully sheer, clever, sharply porfessional and ridiculous hippie nonsense, but it's never ever boring, and definitely bears repeated listens.


• Rev. Audrey F Bronson and Becky Carlton, Minister of Music – Are You Ready For Christmas?

  Becky Carlton's Hammond organ and Audrey Bronson's expertly modulated vocals, unapologetically full-length, make this a minor Christmas miracle. The field recording technique may not capture every nuance, which is sad, but the power and the deeply felt Christmas message (of getting your life together) more than make up for it. This is improvised Christmas gospel at its very best.


• Reilly and Maloney – A Christmas Album

  Polished, timeless and with a sense of wit – this is not your average folk album, nor your average Christmas record. The care and the love of the craft shines through, and what may seem like a haphazard collection gels together beautifully in the harmonies and arrangements.


• Pierre Cochereau – Improvise sur des Noëls

  The way Pierre Cochereau takes a few melodic notes and creates amazing, hard-hitting compositions purely through his imagination is astounding. These Christmas carols sound like nothing else and are not for the faint-hearted, but give them a chance and you might come away with something no easy-listening album could ever achieve.


• Peter Schreier – Bach: Weihnachts-Oratorium

  It's pretty fantastic how Peter Schreier's expressive singing style seems to transfer over to bring his lightness and verve to an entire orchestra. Lackluster vocal performances bring it down a notch, but its warmth, carefully balanced choral pieces and stellar orchestral direction makes it a must-listen among Christmas Oratorio interpretations.


• Peter Jöback – Jag Kommer Hem Igen Till Jul

  Peter Jöback was never this good again. Somehow, the subject matter, the production and the point in his career made this record one where nothing could go wrong. There's even a Christmas version of "Hallelujah" that's actually good (!).


• Odetta – Christmas Spirituals

  Odetta renders classics like "Go Tell it On The Mountain" entirely unlike anyone else. And yet, it all sounds completely natural, as if these songs were made to sound like this, through perfect conviction. It's an exhilirating experience.


• Noelani and the Leo Nahenahe Singers – Hawaiian Christmas

  Noelani's Hawaiian Christmas uses qualified, seriously-written folk-revival settings, but it's just so joyful. In a way, it's playing around with European and mainstream American material, treating it as a source of fun - like mainstream artists would with Hawaiian music, but without the creeping stereotypes. It's a real eye-opener and a treat to listen to.


• Noël aux Antilles avec Abel Zenon et son Combo

  Abel Zenon was at the height of his power as a biguine singer when he recorded this excellent Christmas album, filled with ideas and catchy hooks. It's not a large-scale, ambitious, arty album, but the ambition of actually recording such a broad range of excellent material is certainly enough.


• Nat King Cole – The Christmas Song

  A tragedy on every level, the loss of Nat King Cole's voice and later his life to the scourge of big tobacco was unfathomably horrible. But I hope I don't come across as a ghoulish goth when I say that on this recording, an aging voice can be a thing of beauty as much as it is a loss.


• Mighty Sparrow – Christmas With Sparrow

  Rarely has an artist been able to switch genres so readily as Mighty Sparrow – his Chistmas record is in total crooner style, and yet beats all crooners at their own game. He has definitely shown his ability to do ballads at other times in his career, but this is an unexpected delight.


• Mercedes Sosa – Navidad con Mercedes Sosa

  Mercedes Sosa's christmas album manages to hone on in on a sense of continued folk tradition, even if it's newly written. That's something both good christmas music and good nueva canción share, and here they work surprisingly well together.


• Mark Kozelek – Sings Christmas Carols

  Mark Kozelek has the amazing ability to create meaning in music beyond and between the actual lyrics, melodies and chords. His interpretations allow new ideas to emerge from sometimes tired-seeming songs, bringing them forward to new generations.


• Madeline MacNeil – The Holly and the Ivy: Christmas Music for Hammered Dulcimer and Voice

  When this album works it does so amazingly well – hammered dulcimer and voice in perfect coordination, lovely singer-songwriter production and some of the most haunting renditions of traditional carols ever heard. A slightly patchy set list and some ill-judged choral selections bring it down a step, but it's still an unassuming treasure.


• Kate and Anna McGarrigle – The McGarrigle Christmas Hour

  The tradition of singing and playing together at Christmas lives on with this very new, old-fashioned family. Talented songwriters and performers all, it's a much more earthy version of what Judy Garland used to do on TV, but it's more ethereal as well.


• Jessye Norman – Christmastide

  From the quietest solo to grand orchestral pomp that beats any grand cinematic theme – Jessye Norman's album is a tour-de-force of all the most over-the-top drama Christmas music can muster. Her voice is capable of bigger things, but sometimes holding it back can be for the greater good.


• Jermaine Dupri Presents the 12 Soulful Nights of Christmas

  Jermaine Dupri was at his height when he decided to make this Christmas album, and he wasn't kidding around. This is newly-written Christmas music of the highest order, both seasonal, complex and fully of its time, deep in the height of the best 1990s RnB.


• Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns – ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas

  Huey "Piano" Smith was an extraordinary figure in lots of ways, and a key person in the development of New Orleans music culture. The record company badly dropped the ball on this record, but it might not have worked in 1962 anyway, with the level of youthful fun on display not associated with Christmas at the time. In that, and may other ways, this is a pioneering albeit all too brief record.


• Chet Atkins – Christmas with Chet Atkins

  This is Chet Atkins the inventive, pioneering guitarist. This is also Chet Atkins the great commercial record producer. There's no need to divide the two, and though in the 1970s the two roles would come to a tension and break, here they're still able to perfectly co-exist, creating enough creatively challenging dissonance and enough sharp unity to suggest some stunningly new possibilites.


• Cantares de Navidad Vol II

  Felipe "La Voz" Rodriguez and Trio Vegabajeño are both here, but it's as if they've been let free. Free from the straight jacket of melodramatic Bolero, and deep into the arms of a big, christmas-tinged Plena party. It's a master class in how to inject the sense of raucous fun back into music that's been standing still, and one of the best Latin christmas albums ever.


• Burl Ives – Christmas Day In The Morning

  Burl Ives was contructed as the great folk song sell-out, certainly during the revival. But though this is sometimes over-arranged, you can still sense his purity of purpose on this fantastic Christmas recording.


• Alabama – Christmas

  Country in the 1980s was probably not at its high point, but Alabama have Nashville's biggest hit machine songwriters writing fantastic originals, and a magical, sensitive lead singer in Randy Owen, whose quietly faltering voice saves it from being entirely airbrushed and one-note. Generously arranged and perfectly crafted, this is an album filled with love for both the season and for recording ingenuity.

7 points – Worthwhile Christmas albums

• The Singers Unlimited – Christmas

  The Singers Unlimited come from a world of ultra-slick advertising perfection, always teetering to fall over into dystopian vapidity. But the dissonances, unusual intervals and fascinatingly woven harmonies keep it firmly on the right side of a great listen.


• Steve Lawrence & Eydie Gormé – That Holiday Feeling!

  You want to be Steve & Eydie – and yet, you don't want to be them. In many ways, this is the perfect celebrity Christmas album. Jazzy, cool and full of energetic ideas, from a couple obviously in love, and yet you can feel it would have been so much more if they'd been let free.


• Seoul Wanderer – Christmas Carols

  I'd never have expected South Korea to be the country to produce the funkiest 1970s Christmas album you can imagine, but Seoul Wanderer brings Christmas music out of any sense of serenity and deep into the stinkiest funk mashing possible. In the process, it does lose a lot of what Christmas music is about, but it's still an amazing ride.


• Ray Conniff – We Wish You A Merry Christmas

  Just about every great Christmas album in the American tradition relies on studio craft to bring out the special atmosphere of the season. And few people are better craftsmen than Ray Conniff.


• Pia Raug & Steve Dobrogosz – Ind Under Jul

  Considering Steve Dobrogosz most famous album, Fairytales, is an equally straightforward collaboration with singer Radka Toneff, this beautiful album will inevitably invite comparison. But Pia Raug brings different, characteristic qualities to the table, and the decision to tackle this material in a similar style is daring, even if the result is sometimes flawed.


• Melveen Leed – Christmas with Melveen

  Listen to Melveen Leed in the background, and you might think she's just a decent but uninteresting traditional Christmas singer. But the strangeness will eventually draw you in, and close listens will reward you with some of the most unsual intrumental combinations, harmonies and contrapuntal melodies in Christmas music history. It couldn't have been recorded in New York or Los Angeles, where the edges would have been sandpapered off.


• Lester Lanin – Christmas Dance Party

  To truly live the Lester Lanin happy-go-lucky lifestyle you need to be insanely rich. But with this Christmas record, we can all be pulled along in the fun. Sometimes, Christmas music can be pure dreamy, high-octane escapism, even if it will never reach a depth that requires a bigger dose of reality and empathy than this can muster.


• Heavy Christmas

  The practice of a label getting all their artists to record a Christmas song is common these days, but surely Heavy Christmas must be one of the earlier – and indeed better – examples. Sure, there are some lesser tracks here and this sort of recording is by nature never going to have a coherent direction, but you can't deny the sharpness and the joy it emanates.


• Funky Christmas

  Soul Music and Christmas occasionally seem to live in different worlds - and many soulful Christmas albums lack nerve and excitement. Not so with Funky Christmas - a compliation on a somewhat obscure label, featuring no A-list artists, that's great and full of commitment quite possibly because of it.


• Frankie Avalon’s Christmas Album

  Frankie Avalon is a competent but not spectacular singer, and the new music here doesn't quite reach the height of old, but what does it matter when the package is this put-together, like a fascinating, elegantly crafted bauble? Never stopping or letting go, the nervousness of the little label taking on the big boys produces relentlessly coming ideas and surprises.


• Eddie Kamae and the Sons of Hawaii – Christmas Time

  It's undeniable that Eddie Kamae and the rest of the Sons of Hawaii are pure masters of their instruments, and the singers on this album (who, to a large extent, are actually daughters) all shine. It's a bit of a mixed bag but you can't deny the class.


• Christmas With Arthur Godfrey and All The Little Godfreys

  Arthur Godfrey was famous for his complete control, of his performances and his performers, and the disparate greats under his contract all shine here. The McGuire sisters' close harmonies, Julius La Rosa's crooning... It's all models for future performances of these songs, even if it scatters off sometimes. (Of course, the control also meant Godfrey eventually squandered them all away, but that's another story.)


• Angela Morley, her Orchestra and Chorus – Christmas by the Fireside

  That this album exists in perfect hi-fi clarity, with witty contrapuntal arrangements and lovely instrumentation, is no surprise. But it take the future arranger of Scott Walker's albums to really bring a sense of wisdom to the songs as well. Some of it leans hokey, but there's a great deal of beauty to appreciate.


• Andre Kostelanetz – Wonderland of Christmas

  Saying that Andre Kostelanetz displays his playful style doesn't quite cover it. Excepting a few slow-moving standards, this is more than just a record to giggle along to - it's genuine, heartfelt oddness, that in the context of an easy listening Christmas album is almost revolutionary.


• André Claveau – Noël avec André Claveau

  It was never going to be the most harrowing of chanson records, but André Claveau seems to have buried as deep into Christmas magic as the genre is able to do. He may be the slickest of the chanteurs, certainly, but perhaps Christmas requires a certain amount of honey to cover the roughness, in order to truly breathe.


• Alan Mills – Christmas Songs From Many Lands

  Alan Mills set out on a series of great didactic projects, trying to get old (well, mostly old) folk songs to everyone. This album is full of gems, some just fragments, and he loves what he is doing – it's a pity the priviledged smugness shines through.

6 points – Decent Christmas albums to bring out once in a while

• Tracey Thorn – Tinsel and Lights

  Tracey Thorn is an artists' artist, and her connections are impeccable. All the coveres here are good choices. And yet, strangely, the originals shine higher - all the restraint she shows as a cover artist is gone when she lets her mind go free. The rest of the material discharges like a battery into her imagination.


• The Merrymen – Merry Christmas with the Merrymen

  The Merrymen create music that sounds more like skiffle pop than Trinidadian calypso. But isn't that their prerogative? Who is to say they don't own it? How much of pop wasn't in its turn influenced by African-American and Caribbean music? Quite beyond cultural politics, this is as pleasant a Christmas album as any, and a blind listen will reward you with a lovely slice of highly polished folk-pop.


• Swingle Singers – Noëls sans Passeport

  In a time when the world looks like we'll never be Sans Passeports again, the optimism of an earlier time is a refreshing reminder of another possibility. It's also, truth to be told, a bit cloying, and the darkness that exists in the best Christmas recordings is simply not here. Perhaps it's a price worth paying.


• Sammy Kaye – Christmas Serenade

  There were certainly earlier Christmas albums, but all before Sammy Kaye were either hastily cobbled-together or dull as dishwater. Here, instead, we're treated to a relaxed jingle-bell warmth that's hard to deny. Better things were to come, but this is where the great American christmas record starts.


• Peggy Lee – Christmas Carousel

  Miss Peggy Lee was an independent, skillful and extraordinarily skilled purveyor of smoky, sophisticated night club chanteuseship. We get glimpses of it here, but in going full-on children's hour she tends to outsmart herself.


• Mae West – Wild Christmas

  Whoever thought up Mae West's sixties recording career was a genius. On paper, this sounds like it should be a car crash of Ethel Merman Disco Album proportions, but nope, it's actually quite good and full of moxie, aided not least by a great band performance, taken with the gravitas it deserves.


• Jerry Barnes – The New Born King

  Jerry Barnes voice is suitable for old carols, for fabulous trad-pop obscurities like "Christmas is a Birthday Time" by Ruth Lyons, and even surprisingly workmanlike in imitating proto-soul. With arranger Ralph Carmichael trying his best to keep up, this patchy, short album is a surprisingly pleasurable path to a new world where folk, soul and rock are changing everything, even sacred music.


• James Brown – A Soulful Christmas

  Behind A Soulful Christmas’ funky Christmas party energy is a surprisingly meaningful record that is essential for any Christmas music collection. While the instrumentation is much the same as Brown’s previous work, the message was new.


• Christmas in Hong Kong with Kong Ling

  I don't want to hate on Kong Ling, but her takes on these standards and carols is a bit of a mess. But sometimes a bit of a messy approach is actually appealing. In a sea of over-slick recordings, the band playing fast and loose with conventions of musicality is surprisingly refreshing.


• Charles Brown – Charles Brown Sings Christmas Songs

  Charles Brown’s relaxed R&B Christmas album contains just enough heart and blues to be a worthwhile listen this holiday season.