Songs for Christmas

When it comes to Christmas music, I am an inherently cynical person. It is very difficult to find something I truly enjoy. The typical Christmas music always seems so trite and commercialized that it just flies in the face of what I view Christmas as. Instead of a truly holy miracle, it is cheapened to a synthetic Santa pulled by plastic reindeer.

For a while I was appeased by the remakes by current Christian artists as I felt they often put emphasis on songs I had otherwise overlooked. However, over the years, that has even worn on me. I was still hearing more production values than their heart.

However, on a recent Relevant podcast, they talked about a new Sufjan Stevens Christmas album. I have always been an outsider on the Sufjan Stevens phenomena, meaning to pick up one of his albums but never quite following through. But after hearing a few of these songs on the podcast, I knew I had to hear the rest.

The songs just sound so authentic. You really get the feeling that he means the words he is singing. That he is happy for the coming of Christ and the eventual salvation that He would provide. It doesn't hurt that the album is huge too. 42 songs huge.

And what would you pay for something like this? $100? $50? How about only $15?!? Yeah. I was shocked too. If you go to Amazon it's like $22, but on iTunes the album download is $15. Crazy. A must buy in my opinion. It will be in heavy rotation for me through the holiday and some songs (Come Thou Fount) will live long past January for me.