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Updated May 28, 2026The 15 best Christmas albums of all time
Most Christmas albums are corporate exercises — a pop singer cuts twelve standards in two weeks and the label sells half a million units to people stocking up for the season. The records below are the ones that escaped the assembly line. Some of them invented a sound that the season couldn't exist without; some of them rewrote the carols their performers grew up on; one of them is a 70-minute Sufjan Stevens box set that takes its own discography seriously enough to include a song called "Christmas in the Room." All of them earn a place on the December rotation for reasons beyond nostalgia.
The list weighs durability over hits. A Christmas album that gets played every December for forty years is better than one that climbed the charts in 1994 and now sounds dated. The picks below skew toward records that hold up across generations — and one or two that are quietly weird enough to slip past the office holiday-party algorithm.
01#1 · 1965
A Charlie Brown Christmas
“The most beautifully sad piece of music ever written about the holiday.”
The most-licensed Christmas record ever recorded, and the one most people would name as the season's defining album. Eleven jazz-piano tracks built around the 1965 TV special — "Linus and Lucy" became the entry point for an entire generation of jazz piano students, and "Christmas Time Is Here" is the most beautifully sad piece of music ever written about the holiday. Plays on every coffee shop's December playlist, and earns it.
02#2 · 1994
Merry Christmas
"All I Want for Christmas Is You" is the greatest pop song written about the holiday since the 1940s, and the rest of the album is better than it gets credit for. Carey reads "Silent Night" as a gospel song, "O Holy Night" as a Whitney Houston-school showcase, and "Joy to the World" as a Joy-to-the-Mariah barnburner with a ten-second falsetto run that has soundtracked every December mall in the world for thirty years. The Christmas album of our generation.
03#3 · 2006
Songs for Christmas
Five EPs Sufjan Stevens recorded between 2001 and 2006 as gifts for friends, eventually compiled into a 42-track box set. Half the songs are Sufjan-style readings of standards ("Holy, Holy, Holy," "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing"); the other half are originals that work as the saddest Christmas album in existence ("Sister Winter," "Did I Make You Cry on Christmas Day?"). Twenty years later, this is the Christmas record indie-music obsessives play in private.
04#4 · 1999
Christmas
Eight slowcore-Christmas tracks from a Duluth band whose entire catalog is built on hush and patience. "Just Like Christmas" is the standout — a two-minute pop song so sweet and so bleak in the same breath that it's become a fixture of indie-band holiday covers. Mimi Parker's vocal on "Long Way Around the Sea" is the saddest thing on any Christmas album in this list. Low is the entry point for skeptics who think "Christmas album" is automatically a contradiction.
05#5 · 1963
A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector
The Wall of Sound applied to Christmas. Recorded with Spector's Wrecking Crew and his Philles Records roster (the Ronettes, Darlene Love, the Crystals), this is where most modern Christmas pop arrangements ultimately come from — the booming reverb on "Sleigh Ride," the layered vocals on "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," the festive density of every track. Spector was a horrifying person who died in prison for murder. The album is not him; it's the singers and the arranger and the band, and they made the most influential Christmas record in history.
06#6 · 2011
A Very She & Him Christmas
Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward's twelve-track Christmas record — recorded in three days, mixed in two, released to a much warmer reception than that production schedule suggests. Deschanel's vocals carry the standards in a Brill Building-meets-bossa-nova way that no one else has approximated. "Baby, It's Cold Outside" gets the warmest reading of any version of the song; "Silver Bells" sounds genuinely like 1953. Slightly chintzy on purpose.
07#7 · 1957
A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra
The Sinatra Christmas record — recorded with Gordon Jenkins's orchestra in the same season that produced "A Swingin' Affair!" and "Where Are You?" Sinatra in 1957 was at the absolute peak of his interpretive powers, and the way he reads "I'll Be Home for Christmas" — with the long phrase on "if only in my dreams" — is the version everyone else on this list is unconsciously trying to match. The orchestra is enormous, the arrangements are textbook, and the whole thing sounds like a 1957 living room.
08#8 · 1960
Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas
Ella Fitzgerald, the Frank DeVol orchestra, twelve standards, recorded in three sessions across August 1960. Fitzgerald's reading of "Sleigh Ride" is the most exuberant performance on any Christmas record; her "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is the most emotionally controlled version of the song ever cut. The album has been continuously in print for sixty-six years, which is itself a kind of canonization.
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#9 · 1982
It's Christmas Time Again
The compilation of Stax Records' Christmas catalog — Otis Redding's "Merry Christmas Baby," Booker T. & the M.G.s's "Jingle Bells," Albert King's "Christmas Comes But Once a Year," Carla Thomas's "Gee Whiz, It's Christmas." This is what soul Christmas sounds like — heavy on the horns, slower than the pop equivalents, a specifically Black Memphis tradition that mainstream Christmas radio has historically erased. Required listening if your only frame of reference is Bing Crosby and Mariah.
10#10 · 2009
Christmas in the Heart
The most divisive Christmas record ever released. Dylan in 2009 was deep in his late-period rasp, and his readings of "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Must Be Santa" are either delightful or unbearable depending on what you brought to the listening session. The arrangements are meticulously period-correct (ragtime, polka, mariachi, cornet-driven swing); Dylan's voice is meticulously not. All royalties go to charity (Feeding America, the World Food Programme, Crisis UK), which is itself a reason to spin it.
11#11 · 2010
A Christmas Cornucopia
Annie Lennox's reading of fourteen carols, recorded with the African Children's Choir backing on six tracks. Lennox's voice — already the most distinctive instrument in 80s synth-pop — is at its full strength here, and the choral arrangements give the record a global-folk feel that distinguishes it from the standard Anglo-American Christmas template. "Universal Child" is the album's argument; "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" is the standard most pop-album Christmas covers strain to match.
12#12 · 1968
Snowfall — The Tony Bennett Christmas Album
Bennett's first Christmas album and still the best version of his catalog's seasonal output. Robert Farnon's orchestrations are the warmest in the genre — "I'll Be Home for Christmas" sounds like an entire room of strings agreeing on a single emotional note — and Bennett's diction at age 42 is impossibly clear. "I Love the Winter Weather" is the lost gem; the title track is the closer that lands.
13#13 · 2012
Holidays Rule
The Hear Music compilation — Paul McCartney, Fun., Andrew Bird, Y La Bamba, Black Prairie, Rufus Wainwright, the Civil Wars, and a dozen others reading Christmas standards. Most multi-artist compilations are structurally uneven; this one isn't. Andrew Bird's "Auld Lang Syne" is the album's emotional high point, Fun.'s "Sleigh Ride" is the surprise singalong, and the whole thing functions as a snapshot of what indie pop sounded like in late 2012.
14#14 · 1983
A Christmas Album
Often dismissed as adult-contemporary by critics who didn't grow up with it; here as the strongest defense that an album becomes great by becoming inseparable from a specific household's December tradition. Grant's reading of "Tennessee Christmas" (a song she co-wrote with Gary Chapman) is the canonical regional Christmas song. The full album was the soundtrack of millions of American Christmases between 1983 and 2000, and it has aged better than most of those listeners would predict.
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#15 · 2008
A Bobby Rush Christmas
Almost no one outside the deep blues community knows about this record, which is why it closes the list. Bobby Rush at age 71 cut a ten-track Christmas album in Memphis with the Stax-Volt rhythm section's grandchildren — the songs are originals or deep blues-tradition standards, the production is intentionally lo-fi, and the result is the most surprising Christmas record made in the last twenty years. "Christmas Eve Boogie" is the album's announcement that this is not a polite holiday record. Find it on Bandcamp.
Christmas albums are the only genre where consensus is allowed to be unfashionable. Most of these records are old, most of them are sentimental, and most of them have been played at every December gathering for so long that it's hard to hear them fresh. That's a feature, not a bug — the canon of Christmas music is one of the few things American pop culture agrees on across generations.
Drop your case for the missing pick — Andy Williams's "The Andy Williams Christmas Album," Aretha's "This Christmas," the Phil Spector reissue with Darlene Love and the Ronettes — by rating the album yourself on Goat. The chart updates as the community catches what we missed. Next chart on the queue: best concept albums.
Questions.
What is the best-selling Christmas album of all time?
Mariah Carey's "Merry Christmas" (1994) — over 16 million copies sold worldwide, and "All I Want for Christmas Is You" alone earns the artist roughly $2.5 million in royalties every December. It's also the best Christmas album of the last 40 years, but the canon goes back further.
What's the oldest Christmas album that's still considered great?
Vince Guaraldi Trio's "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) is the consensus answer — eleven jazz-piano tracks recorded for a TV special that became inseparable from the holiday in American popular memory. Bing Crosby's "Merry Christmas" (1945) is older but is more a compilation than a unified album.
Are there Christmas albums that aren't sentimental?
A few. Sufjan Stevens's "Songs for Christmas" boxed set (2006) is melancholy more often than cheerful. Low's "Christmas" (1999) treats the carols as slowcore meditations. Bob Dylan's "Christmas in the Heart" (2009) is famously divisive — listeners either love or hate his rasped readings of "Here Comes Santa Claus."
What makes a Christmas album "good" vs. just "Christmas"?
The same thing that makes any album good — production care, performance commitment, and a point of view. The bad Christmas albums are the ones recorded in two weeks with no idea about why these songs need to exist again. The good ones bring something — a new arrangement, a strange voice, a regional sensibility — that the standards don't already have.
When does the Christmas-album streaming spike start?
Spotify data shows holiday-music plays start ramping the day after Halloween (November 1) and peak the week of December 22–28, with a steep drop-off after Christmas Day. If you're starting a Christmas album playlist, build it in early November and let it season.
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