Ho Ho Hoey Christmas Time Is Here, Gary Hoey (Wazoo)

Back in the 90s, Hoey started down the Christmas road with the original Ho Ho Hoey, offering old-school hard rock instrumental takes of popular carols, and he followed through with second and third albums offering more of the same. Needless to say there have been multiple repackagings of this material as well as Hoey's Christmas concert tours, and if you visit his website there's plenty of swag to go with it. For 2025 he's back with another collection, which I believe is all new recordings, though there may be a couple repeats of previous selections in the playist. The musical style is more hard rock of the kind that filled classic rock airwaves through the years, but given that a tour through the best-sellers lists will expose you to everything from bluegrass to countrypolitan, synth-pop to singer-songwriter sounds, Great American Songbook to garage rock, or 70s top 40 to 90s grunge, there's no reason that you should avoid putting a little of this in your holiday playlists. The title song from the "Peanuts" soundtrack is a gentle ballad treatment featuring a bit of violin, and "O Holy Night" and "Silent Night" are straight 4/4 slow dance takes, but Hoey's versions of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas," "Up On the Rooftop," "Angels We Have Heard on High," "The Nutcracker (Sugar Plum Fairy)," "Jingle Bells," and "Christmas Miracle" feature plenty of uptempo guitar shredding. "Still Got the Blues For Christmas" is a slow blues, but it's the outlier here in that he sings this one. Downloads and streaming everywhere.