Christmas Music I Love

Beth and I just got back from driving back and forth to Florida so we spent about 45 hours in the car - and we listened to Christmas music pretty much the whole way! We recently had friends over who I was shocked to learn only owned about 6 Christmas albums - I said I have over 100! (118 to be exact), and I sent them home with 2 cds to add to their collection. And while Beth & I weren't able to listen to all of my Christmas albums on our trip, we did make a pretty good dent - maybe I'll try to listen through them all this year.

But it got me thinking more about some of my favourite Christmas music. The 6 albums pictured in this post are ones I listened to (multiple times) every year. [I should say though that the Oh Hellos album is a new listen this year, but I love it and it belongs on this list]. The Savior album by Sovereign Grace moves me to tears with some of the beautiful music and theologically rich lyrics. Don Ross's Wintertide is acoustic guitar instrumentals at their best, and Mike Janzen's Carols has amazing jazz piano versions of favourite songs. Come Let Us Adore Him is a creative take with production and songs by Steve Hindalong and Derri Daugherty from the great band The Choir. The Acoustic Christmas album is a compilation I made up many years ago now, consisting of favourite carols and original seasonal songs [Beth says it's getting a bit dated but so is she and I still love her (and this album)].

If I wanted to round out this list to make it a top 10, I'd probably need to include Bruce Cockburn's Christmas, Glad's An Acapella Christmas, Riki Michele's Come Let Us Adore, and Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb. There are lots of other great albums on my list (click on the picture below if you want to see them all) - we listened to the old Michael Card album The Promise on the trip and I was reminded what beautiful songs he's written on this theme. Plus, Marc Martel released his Christmas Collection this year, which is amazing. Oh, and Apologetix's Have Yourself a Parody Little Christmas is both hilarious and profound! I also want to give a shout out to local musician Kevin Ramessar for his great Snow on Snow album. We also listen to Jacob Moon's This Christmas album, and taking in one of his awesome live shows is a recent lovely Christmas tradition.