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No one loves a culture warrior, and so, please don’t be that person who tells your Starbucks barista that your name is “Merry Christmas.” Save it for your in-laws!

I’m fine with the greeting, “merry Christmas,” having morphed in our country into “seasons greetings” and “happy holidays.” From a historical perspective, Christianity seems better suited to be a cultural minority, after all.

As a result, it’s not with any triumphalism but rather some bemusement that I perceive holiday music to be the last outpost of nominally “keeping the Christ in Christmas.” Year after year, musicians of little or no particular faith commitment will release Christmas albums. All well and good. Let me ask you, therefore, What are your favorite Christmas albums?

I’ll tell you what they are.

Just to be clear, the below musical selections aren’t just my favorite Christmas albums, but by accepting cookies from this website, Liberti Collingswood legal tells me that you’re now obligated to receive these choices as your own favorite sets of holiday jingles. (“Liberti” is a Latin word for “I always knew that I needed help with improving my musical sensibilities.”)

Here goes, your top three:

Elvis’ Christmas Album (1957)

The King himself. Come for the sultry “Blue Christmas” and the languid “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” but stay for “Santa Claus is Back in Town,” the hardest rocking Christmas tune of all time.

A Christmas Gift for You (1963)

The creation of Phil Spector and associates (i.e., Darlene Love, the Ronettes, the Crystals, et. al.). A Spector-full symphony orchestra meets the Wrecking Crew and parties with the best pop singers of their generation.

The Complete James Brown Christmas

I’m cheating on this one a little bit since it’s three separate JB Christmas albums, all recorded between 1966 and 1970 in one package. You’ll hear classics like “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto” while as a bonus being able to listen in real time to the evolution of soul music into funk.

These are your new favorite Christmas albums! I hope you like them, and you’re welcome.

Since I’m feeling magnanimous, you can have two wild card records to round out a top five. My extra Christmas offerings are, from my home town of New Orleans, Kermit Ruffins’ Have a Crazy Cool Christmas, and from my adopted home town of Philadelphia, Marah’s A Christmas Kind of Town. (Fittingly, however, the particular town described in the latter’s title track is not Philadelphia, but New York. Of course, a Philly band singing about how NYC is the most awesome Christmas city ever is the Philly-iest thing a Philly band could ever do. Underdogs forever!)

We can now move on to your favorite Christmas singles. Of course, the A-side is “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” from Bruce, the only platter that can give Elvis’ “Santa Claus is Back in Town” a run for its egg nog.

But here’s my deep cut B-side, and it crosses over from the secular back to the sacred: Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night.” (As a high schooler in the ’90’s when grunge was ascendant, with great pride I told everyone who would listen that my favorite musical artists were Bruce Springsteen and Paul Simon. Trust me on this one: it was hella hot.)

“7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” which appeared on S&G’s third album, 1966’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, took a page from the voiceover treatment that Phil Spector gave the same classic hymn on A Christmas Gift for You. But if Spector spoke words of thanks over his version of “Silent Night,” Simon and Garfunkel overlaid a lovely rendition of the carol with a simulated recitation of a 7 o’clock news broadcast. Meaning, as we listen to this Christmas song we love, we at the same time are given discouraging updates about the struggle for civil rights, the quagmire of the Vietnam war, and the fear mongering over underground communism in America. In the midst of such national turmoil, the song asks, is it possible, after all, that all could yet be calm and bright?

The effect of this mashup doesn’t strike me at all as sacrilegious. In fact, “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night” meets me in my own moments of doubt, fear, and cynicism. Our news reports—and Twitter feeds, etc.—are just as fraught as those of 1966, if not more so. As the planet warms and our nation burns, does the birth of a single individual 2,000 years ago hold out any hope for us?

This is the crux of my personal faith challenge every Christmas season, and in my good years, I let that struggle breathe. It’s easier for me to block out the headlines “out there” in order to try and be with Jesus “in here,” but whenever I do, the holiday feels hollow.

On the other hand, the church at its best has confessed, along with the carol, that in Christ we glimpse “the dawn of redeeming grace.” This redeeming grace, which came by Jesus through his own crux (“cross”) is designed not only for warm fuzzies but also for hot topics, for true pain and for real sin. In Advent, I ask God’s Spirit to bridge the gap between heavenly peace and the evening news. See if you can catch some holy days and nights in those same spaces.

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