Oy To the World, The Klezmonauts (Satire)

This band offers a sort of reverse-Hanukkah alert, in that klezmer music is a Yiddish folk form yet almost all the songs on this 1998 album are standard Christmas carols in klezmer style. "Deck the Halls," "Jingle Bells," "We Three Kings," the title carol, "Little Drummer Boy," and so on. One novelty tune appears here, "Santa Gey Gesunderheit," the only vocal, in which a Jewish haberdasher marvels at a certain North Pole's resident's ability to execute his Christmas Eve route. A one-joke album, handicapped further by the fact that The Three Weissmen executed funnier versions of "Deck" and "Jingle" in the same vein on the long-out-of-print Blame It On Christmas. Nevertheless, this has its charms, in that it's an original idea nobody else appears to have tried.