It’s a bleak winter’s night, and Bob Sumner’s rustic-for-Strathcona house is pretty much what you’d expect. The bikes cluttering the hallway outnumber the tenants, Willie Nelson’s Christmas album (Pretty Paper) is being piped through the entire building, and there appears to be a shotgun leaning against a wall. It’s an urban-folkie oasis with a hint of survivalism thrown in. Funny, then, that the last Sumner Brothers record sounded more like hesher Rush than Tom Rush.

“At some point we needed to compete with loud audiences, so we started writing harder stuff,” reasons brother Brian, the older and apparently more experimentally inclined half of the duo.

“The way we recorded that album, we did the bed tracks and then he just went weird with it,” adds Bob, nodding at Brian. “On his own, mostly.”

Some asshole at the Georgia Straight has already praised September’s The Hell in Your Mind for, among other things, its “punctilious feel and hyper-articulate guitar and bass work”, and that’ll be the material the brothers bring to their 10th annual Christmas Holiday Extravaganza this weekend at the Rickshaw, augmented in spectacular fashion, we’re sure, by Kenton Loewen (drums) and Joseph Lubinsky-Mast (bass). Promo-ing that show is the real reason we’re here in Bob's kitchen, drinking all of his Italian beer. Last year’s effort was off the hook, but then again, it always has been. The only difference is scale.

“The first one was at the ANZA Club,” recalls Brian. “Although we got kicked outta there a couple times. All our buddies would come to the show, old suburban kids. The ambulance was there three years in a row.” Bob struggles to recall the year that someone was found bleeding to death outside the venue. “I think it was the second one,” he offers, squinting. Did he make it? “I dunno,” he shrugs, amiably. “The ambulance took him away.”

Gradually, the show moved to the WISE Hall (“I think it might have been because the ANZA had had enough,” suggests Bob), growing in size, if not maturity. It was around this time that the Sumners met the legendary Elliott C. Way, whose country-folk evangelism constituted the most heroic effort to galvanize a city’s music scene since Gram Parsons dosed L.A. with tequila, weed, and George Jones.

“He’s a visionary,” says Bob, quickly adding that Way’s band, the Wild North, will be among this year’s guests. Also returning from last year’s barnburner are Viper Central’s Kathleen Nisbet (another visionary, as it happens, and the prime mover behind the East Van Opry), the Real Ponchos, Twin Bandit, the exquisitely lovely Sarah Jane Scouten, and 22-year-old Etienne Tremblay, who stole 2014’s party with a couple of shit-hot Elvis tunes.

The Sumners have also invited friends from Ballard, Washington’s unreasonably excellent country-music scene.

“I don’t like a lot of new country because it feels to me like Mr. Dressup,” says Bob, of A.P. Dugas, “but he’s a Texas songwriter and he’s just so good. These are all people that I believe in, and who deserve to be heard.”

Speaking of belief, drunk Santa makes his 10th appearance at the Christmas Holiday Extravaganza. But not the real Santa.

“You find me another Santa that’s been working 10 years in a row,” thunders Brian. “He should be the real Santa.”

“For some reason we were able to get away with this,” Bob muses, “but we sell shot glasses as merch, and you’d pay five bucks, get a shot of CC, and have a shot with Santa. And Santa would go fucking shot-for-shot with, like, 70 people. And then he’d always puke, but his wife’s a nurse, so she’d take him home and put an IV in his arm at the end of the night.”

Turns out this only happened once (the IV, that is), but the brothers agree it’s always better to print the legend.

The Sumner Brothers Christmas Holiday Extravaganza takes place at the Rickshaw Theatre on Saturday (December 19).