Alice Cooper's A Taste of Christmas Pudding 2025, various artists (SoundVision)

We've previously noted Alice Cooper's foundation that provides musical education to at-risk youths and their ongoing habit of issuing Christmas music collections based on their annual Christmas concerts. As always, the benefactor's musical past and influences are big influences in what the students come up with, as in Pinup's imaginative deconstruction of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," Vipera's "O Come O Come Emanuel," Faultline's "What Child Is This," Plum's "Sugar Plum Pudding" that starts out as "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town," and Distorted's "Feliz Navidad," but there are more poppy items like Zayah's "It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like Christmas," Lizzie's "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch," Dually Noted's "Underneath the Tree," Sammie Jaclyn's "Grown Up Christmas List," and Evelyn Errante's acoustic reading of the traditional "O Holy Night." Mitchael has a poppy rocker in "This Christmas," not the Donny Hathaway song, and Dylan Dean does "O Holy Night" in a more rocked-up arrangement while sneaking in Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah." Some decent playlist candidates here, although the poppier entries have a flavor of "theatre kid" about them. Streaming and downloads wherever you shop. Oh, in case you have trouble searching this out, the artist name in the metadata is "Proof Is in The Pudding." And since I missed it last year, here's the 2024 edition of this series.