Once upon a time, HERC was in a Virgin Megastore (remember those?) and found a Christmas CD titled The Ultimate Christmas Album with the tagline "25 Great Songs for the 25th of December".
That's the newer, reissued in 2008 album cover art above. That new artwork is featured in the rest of this post merely for continuity and a generous dollop of laziness on HERC's part. The original cover artwork, as it appears on the disc HERC bought that day way back in 1999, is below:
At the register, there were two small displays of Christmas CDs labeled as Virgin Megastore exclusives. Thanks to a small yet effective tantrum and their cheap price ($3.99), Mrs. HERC authorized the purchase of both budget discs and The Ultimate Christmas Album.
Turns out The Ultimate Christmas Album was the first in a series and by the time HERC found that initial volume, there were already three other volumes out. By the following Christmas, he had rounded those up as well.
While each volume featured many classic and sometimes hard to find Holiday hits, The Ultimate Christmas Album Volume 3 stands out because of it's inclusion of the highly sought after and rarely licensed "Christmas Vacation" by Mavis Staples, as heard at the beginning of the movie Christmas Vacation and in the Christmas lights video below:
And speaking of Christmas Vacation, does anyone else besides HERC have a love/hate relationship with the Old Navy commercials featuring the cast from the movie?
Each volume in the series had a certain recipe to the playlist: a few classic Christmas songs peppered with lesser known songs by popular artists followed by a dash of novelty tunes, sometimes some New Year's tunes and a doo-wop Christmas song or two. Volume 4 kicks off with this track from the other King:
Volume 5 featured more 70's and '80s songs than any previous volume as well as a slight improvement in sound quality. The first track on the album is featured in the following video:
The sixth volume of The Ultimate Christmas Album (notice how the title was truncated for the 2008 reissue of the series?) features even more somewhat contemporary Holiday hits including this one:
To date, the last volume in the series is Volume 7. It breaks the tradition of featuring 25 tracks on each album by only featuring 24 cuts. Once again, Elvis kicks off the festivities:
BONUS STOCKING STUFFERS: Arista Records issued two compact discs of Christmas music with a similar name to the Ultimate series above. To avoid create avoid create avoid confusion as well as possible litigation, HERC has included songs from the those two albums in the Ginormous Playlist at the very bottom of this post.
In the spirit of the Holidays and that old chestnut "the more, the merrier" (which, for the record, HERC does not subscribe to) here is another Arista Christmas album, Platinum Christmas. (There were two other volumes of Platinum Christmas released outside of America but HERC hasn't been able to score his own copies of those yet.)
And finally, HERC brings you the imported double CD known as The Ultimate Christmas Collection which features a generous helping of British artists. It's got cool cover art, too.
Here's the GINORMOUS PLAYLIST
No comments:
Post a Comment