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The popular 80s band had this out originally on a limited basis in 1984 and it was on their website for a free download in 2008. It's a straight a capella performance of "Winter Wonderland," not quite doo-wop but definitely not glee club either. Worth having.

This was the flip side of the song "I Would Die 4 U," from the "Purple Rain" soundtrack, and if you didn't know it was Prince, you still would be hard pressed to guess anybody else. It's one of The Artist's power ballad/melodramas, and while it's not as good as its A-side, it's still a worthy effort for the Christmas season. Given Prince's prolific tendencies, it's kind of amazing he hasn't done another Christmas song since this 1984 effort. Still available on Prince's B-sides compilation CD.

Yeah, yeah, I know, one of the original "boy bands," though they had the good fortune to fall into the hands of New Edition producer Maurice Starr, who produced and wrote or co-wrote all the original songs on this 1989 album. (Ironically, he wasn't around for New Edition's Christmas album.) As a result, this has the sound of an 80s R'nB record, which means good grooves and cheap synthesizers. The album is bracketed with the sappy and non-holiday "This One's For the Children," but the second cut, "Last Night I Saw Santa Claus," gets things into a more uptempo groove, as does the rap "Funky Funky Xmas." The rest of the tunes are pretty downtempo, from straight ballads to slow jams. Covers of "White Christmas" and "Little Drummer Boy" round things out. Given the strong musical bed, it's sometimes disappointing when the Kids' white-bread voices come in. Still, this album isn't nearly as embarrassing as it could be. No doubt this was reissued for 2008 in the wake of the NKOTB reunion.

And yeah, that's almost right, except this self-proclaimed psychobilly band did do three Christmas tunes on this 1988 album, reissued as a double with the album Rockin' Out. They do good versions of "Santa Bring My Baby Back to Me," "Santa Claus Is Back In Town" and they set a martial beat to "Blue Christmas." Oh, almost overlooked "Oh Little Town of Bedrock," in which the 'Stoneses home town is substituted for Bethlehem, and most of the song is substituted for a really fast shuffle that doesn't sound like any Christmas song I know. Sure rocks out, though.

This 1980 British-only album trumps the previously-mentioned Ravers by offering an entire album of punk rock Christmas tunes, probably the first such recording, created by The Yobs, better known by their name spelled backwards. It's mostly revved-up versions of Christmas standards, although there are a couple of originals here too, like "Another Christmas," as in "I don't think I could take / Another Christmas Day with yewwwwww." A little tedious all at once, but it has its moments. They also did "Yobs On 45," a single with a Christmas medley, in the fashion of those disco-era "Stars On 45" records, which was on the CD reissue. UPDATE: Randy Anthony's Hip Christmas has been following the Yobs/Boys more closely than I have, noting that they revisited punk Xmas with Christmas Vol. 2 in 1991, with all new songs, and a live album with acoustic versions of some of these songs. Not wanting to pilfer someone else's hard work -- those latter two albums are exceedingly rare -- you are advised to click on over for the rest of the story.

The Ramones were actually pretty slow to jump on the punk rock Christmas bandwagon; this is from 1989's Brain Drain album and also appeared on the occasional B-side and compilation since, like The Edge of Christmas and Rhino's Punk Rock Xmas, which notes its version is from the UK single. It's fairly self-explanatory; look at the beauty of the season, why can't we stop fighting, and so on. Writer (the late, great) Joey Ramone dedicates it to his girlfriend. An early demo of this turned up on Joey's solo EP.

Another pseudonymous Christmas record, this is really the Revillos, who started life as the Rezillos, and if you know who I'm talking about you know what this 1981 record sounds like: a punk-pop girl-singer version of the Phil Spector arrangement of this song. To help you remember what year this record was made, the B-side is "1982 Make a Wish."

This British EP from 1981 features four songs by four different bands, two of which are pop Christmas covers and the other two holiday chestnuts. The 4 Skins hype up Elton John's "Step Into Christmas" and the Business do a straight cover of Slade's "Merry Christmas Everybody." If Irving Berlin thought Elvis ruined "White Christmas," The Gonads' version probably helped finish him off for good, and Max Splodge does a nearly incomprehensible "12 Days of Christmas" in which the lyrics are changed to... something else entirely, near as I can tell. UPDATE: Somewhere along the line, this vinyl EP became a full-length album. Amazon posts it as 2007 but I recall hearing about the expansion earlier. WFMU-FM radio listed this expanded compilation as having a release date of 1994. Add to the above songs "Christmas Time Again" by Bad Manners, "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day," "Christmas Medley," "Christmas Is Really Fantastic" and "O Come All Ye Faithful" by Frank Sidebottom, "Snowman" by Anti-Nowhere League, "Blue Christmas" and "Santa Bring My Baby Back To Me" by Frantic Flintstones, "Jingle Bells" and "Christmas in Dreadland" by Judge Dread, "Stuff the Turkey" by Alien Sex Fiend, "Turkey Stomp" by The Hotknives, "Auld Lang Syne" by UK Subs, "Drinking and Driving" by Business and "White Christmas" by Stiff Little Fingers. Some of these songs have been mentioned elsewhere on the site, others have not. They appear to be a wider sampling of Christmas punk from the same period as the original EP, however.

Still another Christmas punk single from 1983 by a Welsh band, with a nod to "punks and skins (skinheads) everywhere," keeping in mind that Brit skinheads of the 80s were not quite as sinister as American skinheads of the 90s. No surprises here, although it's a fairly listenable Christmas rocker.

A politically oriented British punk band best known for Christ -- The Album and The Feeding of the Five Thousand, this 1981 single seems to have fallen through the cracks, probably because it is completely atypical; The Trouser Press Record Guide describes the band as abrasive and guitar-oriented with political lyrics, yet this double-sided instrumental single is organ, synths and drum machine playing a mixture of traditional holiday tunes and original themes in medley form. Both sides are this way, in fact, although they are not identical performances. A legend on the B-side label notes that 20 million turkeys are slaughtered for Christmas in Britain alone, for what that's worth.

The highly elusive and dramatic singer-songwriter from England, a protege of Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, visited the Christmas music realm for the first time in 1980 with this theatrical ballad full of nostalgia and anticipation for the holiday. Not exactly a turntable hit, it nevertheless resonates fondly among her fans and pops up frequently on compilations, not to mention as a frequently compiled B-side among her later singles. You need to prowl compilations to find it though, as it only appears on her box set now.

Long a cult artist since he turned up in the early 70s with a fair amount of hype in Rolling Stone magazine, most people only know of him today through his Budweiser commercials. Leon's thing has always been early jazz-age pop singing with period instrumentation, and this 1987 collection of pop Christmas chestnuts is solidly in that tradition. A little too sedate for a rock 'n roll Christmas, perhaps, but his duet with Dr. John on "Frosty the Snowman" is a nice change of pace on your Christmas mix tapes.

Shooting Star, despite being on alternative label Enigma, was more of a pop/hard rock act, with all the late-80s shiny production that suggests. But having said that, this isn't a bad Christmas rocker, although the production suggests something that's played over the closing credits of a movie. From their greatest-hits album, circa 1989, although it may have been recorded earlier than that.

The title's a pun on late lead singer Patty Donohue's talk-sing delivery of a great song about being single on Christmas Eve. An instant classic in the vein of the Waitresses' best-known hit, "I Know What Boys Like." Originally released on the Ze Christmas album, also released as a single, and is on the group's best-of album as well as EMI's The Edge of Christmas and Excelsior's A Rock 'n Roll Christmas. Amazon has a downloadable EP that has the single edit, the regular version and an instrumental called "Hangover 1/1/83." King Biscuit Flower Hour also released a live Waitresses album from 1982 that includes a concert version of the song.

George is better known for leaving his band high and dry in the spring while he runs off and plays baseball, or for his one great video of "Bad to the Bone" with Bo Diddley. Still, he apparently has a soft enough spot for the holidays that he wrote both sides of this 1983 single, the B-side being "New Year's Eve Party." The A-side turns up on compilations from time to time, the B-side hardly ever. George put out another holiday single a couple of decades later, and we have that posted elsewhere on the site.

The synthesizer duo with the pop hooks and elaborate shows released this single in 1988, and it's aces, a danceable beat and terrific melody. This should be a holiday radio staple, but it's not. Originally available as a single and on a rare Warner Brothers compilation promo album, it was also on their Crackers International EP. The B-side of the single is "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen," and that seems to be unavailable now.

Available only as a promo CD at the time, the guys dashed off these two tunes at a 1989 soundcheck, "Christmas Time" and "Jinga Bell Rock," both originals. "Jinga" is a flat-out rocker with a touch of "Walk This Way" in it, and "Christmas Time" is more mid-tempo and reflective. Both are excellent performances but easily recognizable as BoDeans tunes. The band has since thoughtfully posted both songs at their own site for download.

Actually, I only ever found this on a flexidisc from Britain's Flexipop magazine back in 1981. Taking the track from "Rapture," Debbie Harry and Fab Five Freddy do a little Christmas rapping, no Kurtis Blow reference intended. A fun item if a rare one; I think this has managed to go unissued from that day to this one. Fortunately, somebody thought to throw it up on YouTube. A reformed Blondie took on "We Three Kings" in 2009.

Adams has a lot of fans, and just as many people who dismiss him as a watered-down Tom Petty. Needless to say, we won't dissuade the fans or change the minds of the nay-sayers with a single 45. "Christmas Time" is the A-side, and it's your basic Bryan Adams tune with a Christmas tilt from 1985. "Reggae Christmas" is a little bit more fun; you see the video for it on VH1 and MTV every year, with the five original MTV vee-jays and a crowd of others forming a conga line behind Bryan and his band. Let's see, they were J.J. Jackson, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn and .... drat, who was that dark-haired guy with the perm .... oh yeah, Mark Goodman. Adams did "Run Rudolph Run" for the first A Very Special Christmas, and he also appeared on a 2002 album called Christmas at the Vatican, singing the A-side here and "On Christmas Day." "Christmas Time" turns up on a number of compilations, but the B-side is pretty rare nowadays.

Originally released for Christmas 1983 in Britain as a single, the U.S. record company figured nobody cared about an original Christmas song recorded for the season and sat on it, letting it sneak out later on Learning To Crawl. A worthy tribute to the season, it's made quite a few compilations and it's also slowly becoming a favored holiday cover, with Coldplay and KT Tunstall among the better-known artists to do so. Chrissie Hynde later covered "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" for A Very Special Christmas, and her 2010 project with JT and the Fairground Boys reputedly contains a Christmas song -- we'll find out shortly.

This is actually Roxy Music, or more precisely guitarist Phil Manzanera, from 1980, not long after the band reformed for the Manifesto album. The song is a masquerade, too, it's actually an instrumental of "Sleigh Ride," with a touch of "Auld Lang Syne" thrown in. Once you know it's Roxy-related, you'll catch yourself nodding your head in recognition. The flip side of this single is a Dumbells original, "A Christmas Dream," another, more New-Agey instrumental. Only available nowadays through the collector's market, if you can find it. UPDATE: Another Roxy offshoot was The Players, saxman Andy MacKay's project, which recorded the album Christmas in 1988 featuring a collection of classic and antique carols in roughly antique performances, heavy on the woodwind instruments as you might imagine.

This came out in 1981 at the height of the early 80s rockabilly revival, and is pretty much as advertised. I never heard of JQ before or since this record, but it's a sprightly performance, very much in the vein of those old "let's write a song about Elvis Presley" records. I don't think this ever turned up on a Rhino Christmas compilation, strangely enough. UPDATE: Carolyn Stuart reports that Que is still an active performer. She also said the song is on iTunes, but I couldn't find it there or anywhere else.

Originally a single in 1981, this Yessong by Chris Squire, Alan White and Pete Sinfield is a fairly straightforward holiday tune. Most folks think symphonic-length compositions when they think of Yes, but this tune tops out at just over four minutes; it has the high vocal harmonies and arrangement with ship-in-a-bottle detail you would expect, but it's uptempo and kind of catchy. Still available on the Yesyears box set. Squire had a full holiday CD in 2007 under the sobriquet "Chris Squire's Swiss Choir," on which this song is included; except for this song, it's a baroque classical outing with a chorus, all very authentic sounding. The choir is overdubbed on the choruses of "Run With the Fox," so it's not exactly the same performance from the original recording, but it's close enough for government work.

This holiday EP from 1987 has been excerpted on a number of compilations over time, mainly the title tune and "Slick Nick (You Devil You)." The title tune is a clattery rave-up of the kind that Fishbone made famous on their regular albums, playing off the classic Jimmy Stewart movie, while "Slick Nick" is an organ-led ballad castigating the jolly elf for his carousing ways. The uptempo "Just Call Me Scrooge" tells Ebenezer's story in a danceable way. Rounding out the EP is "Iration," a swaying reggae prayer that is not necessarily holiday-related. Nice stuff, and pretty hard to find -- my copy is a Japanese import. A double-disc odds 'n sods collection has all four songs from this EP on it.

I just unearthed this 1984 collection out from under a pile of vinyl. My copy is cheaply packaged with photocopied liner notes and cover art and not even a way to tell which is the A-side, at least not in a faintly lit room, anyway. Whether this is a promo copy or the actual final release is probably lost in the sands of time. UPDATE: Definitely a promo, just found the full-color cover art at left. End update. Nevertheless, there's good 80s vintage indie music in these grooves. The early 2000s wasn't the first time there was a fad for retro 60s garage rock, as most of this album attests. Plan 9's "Merry Christmas," Yard Trauma's "Christmas Tyme (Baby)," "Forget It" by Nadroj and the Wolrats, "Schizophrenic Xmas" by Suburban Nightmares are all in this vein, as well as the album's best cut, "Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)" by The Tryfles, a witty combination of "Angels We Have Heard on High" and Them's "Gloria." Think about it for a second, it'll come to you. Elsewhere on the LP, we get power-pop from Wednesday Week on "Christmastime Here (Could Never Be Like That)," the Dogmatics on "Xmas Time (It Sure Doesn't Feel Like It)" and The Point with "On Comet," Cheepskates give us a pop-rock "Christmastime With You" and a surf instrumental "Last Minute Rush," Johnny Rabb goes garage on "Christmas Dance" and rockabilly on "Gotta Get Lucky for Xmas," and Screamin' Jay Hawkins (the very same) gives us a blues piano take on "It's Xmas (A Time For Giving)." And there's a nod to Phil Spector with the Droogs' version of "Silent Night" to close the album. A few of these cuts have trickled out on other compilations over the years, but I think this collection could stand the test of time as a CD reissue. FURTHER UPDATE: Sean Delany writes in to tell us that this album was just volume 1, there was a volume 2 in 1986 and volume 3 in 1987. Randy at Hip Christmas has some more info, including track listings for all three LPs.

Orignally from 1985, and out of print for years, it turned up again in Europe for 2007 as a 22nd anniversary edition, which is now available domestically through Amazon's manufactured-to-order service. It's been remastered from the vinyl days and it includes five bonus tracks, which are interspersed through the running order rather than grouped at the end. As to the actual music, well, it's not unexpected if you're familiar with the work of Anderson's former band Yes, though it's arranged more for orchestra than for small combo. Anderson writes the bulk of the material, though a fair number of classic carols are part of the set list, including the title song and the Mozart version of "Ave Maria." Much of Anderson's music, in fact, takes its cue from the antique carols, and there's very little rock going on here. One might consider this a forerunner of Mannheim Steamroller and Trans-Siberian Orchestra, though with far less bombast than those two. Though it's Jon's show, he's assisted by sometime Yes-men Trevor Rabin and Vangelis, the latter of whom contributed a full song and a co-write, and, for you trivia buffs, Elliot Easton of the Cars performs on electric and acoustic guitars.

Post-new wave jangly pop-rock from Matthew Sweet, who wrote and performed most instruments on this tune from the 1984 EP Soundcastles, co-produced by Don Dixon. Sweet's vocal is buried, so it's tough to parse the lyrics; I detect a relationship song hung on the Christmas peg. This tune was also a single, and I'm guessing the original vinyl versions are pretty rare. Fortunately, they're on a Sweet rarities disc titled To Understand -- The Early Recordings of Matthew Sweet, on Hip-O. Matthew also performed "Baby Jesus" on the seminal Yuletunes compilation from 1991, which is available again.

This actually was a Top Ten hit in Great Britain and made no. 1 in several European countries upon its single release in 1980. It's a soldier's holiday lament, fusing synth-pop and martial music to create its mood. For some reason it appears on Dr. Demento's Holidays in Dementia, although it seems not particularly demented to me. Of course, if the good Doctor hadn't compiled it I would have never known that Jona started out in the British blues scene -- and for sure you never would have guessed it from his recordings for Stiff. He was part of the second-wave Live Stiffs tour, along with Lena Lovich, Rachel Sweet, Wreckless Eric and Mickey Jupp, and his other hits included "You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties" and "God Bless Whoever Made You." This has become a staple of British holiday music in recent years, as noted in Thea Gilmore's "That'll Be Christmas," with its lyric "Jona Lewie on the radio."

Originally released in 1985 on Coyote as a 12-inch EP with seven songs, a 1993 CD re-release on East Side Digital ballooned it to 17 tracks, though it deletes another Stamey track from the original, "Something Came Over Me." For 2006, Collectors Choice reissues this CD with six new tracks. As to the album itself, it remains a fairly slapdash affair that evokes the spirit of the Beach Boys Party album, with a cast of characters that is mainly power popsters from the right coast: Stamey and his former partners in the dBs, Alex Chilton and his former band Big Star, Syd Straw, Caitlin Cary, Marshall Crenshaw, Don Dixon, Ryan Adams with Whiskeytown, and a number of other folks. The original EP had the feel of something that had been slapped together on Christmas Eve over double eggnogs, but the additional cuts detract from that feel a little bit. Still, if you were a fan of the dBs, this feels almost like a lost dBs album. Top cuts include the title song, the dBs' "Holiday Spirit" and their silly take on "Feliz Navidad," Big Star's "Jesus Christ," Cathy Harrington's girl-groupy "Sha La La" and Ted Lyons's "The Only Law Santa Claus Understood," a hilarious recasting of Santa as a Wild West reprobate. Syd Straw gets points for a Christmas pun in the form of a cover of Blondie's "I'm Always Touched by Your Presents, Dear." The new songs are "Lonely Christmas" by Marshall Crenshaw, "Home For the Holidays" by the dBs with Cary, "I Saw Three Ships" and "Christmas is Saturday" by Don Dixon, "Christmas Time Is Here" by Thad Cockrell and Roman Candle, and Whiskeytown's "Houses On the Hill." Some of the other tunes on here are a little too earnest to suit me, but the good cuts make it worthwhile. If it keeps growing like this, by 2052 it will be a box set and around 2200 or so it will have subsumed all the songs mentioned on this site. UPDATE: The reissue gives, and the reissue takes away. Missing from the West Side Digital release are Syd Straw's song, "Occasional Shivers" by Chris Stamey and "Silver Bells" by Kirsten and Brent Lambert.