The squinting stranger who rode into town that Christmas Eve was named Bob Dylan, but the world remembers him as The Man Who Shot Santa Claus.

As sure as the sweet baby Jesus Cristo is every bit as real as Kris Kringle, the Abominable Snowman, and poor tortured Jack Skellington, every year we swear things are going to be different. Forget running out at 5:50 p.m. on December 24 to load up on McDonald’s gift certificates and Lotto 6/49 Quick Picks that we secretly pray won’t be winners: we convince ourselves that we’ll have all our shopping done by the second week of November. And never mind checking our Crackberrys every 2 minutes and 32 seconds all through the day and into the night: we’re going to call in sick at least six days in December so we can kick back and truly enjoy the insanely excellent majesty of Elf, Fred Claus, A Christmas Story, and Rankin-Bass’s craptastic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Not only that, we’re not going to drink a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red on Christmas Eve, mostly because we’re tired of waking up in a puddle of our own drool just as they start singing “Auld Lang Syne” in It’s a Wonderful Life.

But even though we swear every year that we’re finally going to get things right, right down to finishing that heart-warming Christmas-themed screenplay, the sad reality is that this holiday season is guaranteed to be the same shit-show as always. And what’s funny is that doesn’t stop us from loving Christmas one little bit. In fact, we’re so nuts for the most wonderful time of the year that we actually start finalizing that all-important Xmas playlist on the iPod in the last week of August.

If you think like we do, you’ll end up studying the following list of Christmas discs the way your grandparents used to spend the first three weeks of December poring over the toy section of the Sears catalogue. To help get you into the spirit, we’ve made things easy. The instant classics get a shiny present. The inoffensive stuff that ends up being played in four out of five shopping malls gets a pair of ginch. The crap that will make you want to donkey-kick an elf in the testicles—or Mrs. Claus in the cooter—gets a Charlie Brown tree.

Hopefully, you’ll find something that will make your Christmas just a little merrier. And if you don’t, feel free to take some solace in the fact that there’s always next year.

Bob Dylan
Christmas in the Heart (Sony)

Every Christmas after dinner, Grampa Ernie would retire to the sofa, put on a Lawrence Welk record, and drift slowly into a turkey-induced slumber, the steady rattle of his snoring punctuated by the odd wheezing cough, incoherent muttering, burp, or room-clearing fart. Grampa Ernie’s in a better place now, but at least we have this Bob Dylan album to remind us of what those Christmases past sounded like.

> John Lucas

Good Lovelies
Under the Mistletoe (Good Lovelies)

Proving that not everything out of Toronto is hopelessly shit-splattered, lovely will indeed do as an all-purpose description for Under the Mistletoe. The arrangements on songs like “Santa Baby” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” fall somewhere between the hotter-than-roasted-chestnuts retro-jazz of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the made-for-a-hayride bluegrass of the Bad Livers. The harmonies of the Good Lovelies—Sue Passmore, Kerri Ough, and Caroline Brooks—are as gorgeous as unbroken snow on a Cariboo Christmas morning. (Or, if that doesn’t work for you, Zooey Deschanel in Elf.) How great is Under the Mistletoe? Well let’s just say that by the time the Good Lovelies get through with “Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas)” you might actually consider Christmas good for something other than making you wonder why you don’t switch to celebrating Festivus instead.

> Mike Usinger