Those of us with many Christmases-past under our belt and many worries on our shoulders often have a difficult time trying to muster up any Christmas Spirit. We’re lurching towards jollyness and cheer, but time is flying so fast that by the time I realize it’s Christmas it will all have passed. When I was younger Christmas seemed like such a special, separate time. Completely different from the days before and after it. Its own world, really, and it almost felt as if you travelled to this glowing other place, complete with jet-laggy let down when it was over. It doesn’t really feel like that any more, I guess because now that I’m pretending to be an adult the cares and concerns of daily life go on and on and on with non-festive inevitability. Even the merriest traditions take some planning for and paying for and cleaning up after. It’s a pleasure to select gifts for people you love, but a pressure to do so for everyone you love, all at the same time.

Perhaps one way to take the pressure off is to make Christmas spirit, and all that that implies, easier to visit throughout the year. We can honor Christmas in our hearts, and try to keep it all the year. We can live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. We can weave the jolly-merry in with our daily lives. And one of the ways that we can facilitate this is with Christmas music. The Christmas-themed-tunes we hear in stores and doctor’s offices and somehow seemingly pervading the very air we breathe don’t do much to make us feel less bitter and bah-humbugish. They tend to be a) terrible and b) earworms. A dire combination. Of course there are some time-honored carols that you really don’t want to hear the rest of the year because they’ll get spoiled. But the songs I present to you in this list are songs about Christmas and for Christmas that you can carry with you into the world outside Christmas-land, because they’re just that good. You won’t mind listening to them sitting in the yard in June watching fireflies, and thinking about the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree in all the years past and all the years to come.