don't he look natural?

A CD that's in the running for my favorite Christmas disc of the year is one that can't be bought in any store. It's a sampler CD sent to morning deejays by publicist Alan Rommelfanger, whose company is called Daybreak Entertainment. It has tracks from Richard Cheese, Gary Hoey, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, The von Trapp Children and several of his other clients. The first song on the disc is a novelty tune that I thought only I knew about. It's "Disco Santa" by Holiday Express, which I think I might have included on the mix disc I made for some friends a year ago.

Alan put a song from the Brian Setzer Orchestra on his sampler CD too. The BSO makes its annual appearance on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" tonight. I wonder if they'll be playing at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting again tomorrow night. There's no mention of it on the Setzer website but it does say that they'll be on "Fox & Friends" in the morning and that they taped an episode of the "Rachael Ray Show" to air in mid-December. By giving my email address, I was able to get a free download of a live version of "Jingle Bells." I'll have to settle for the free download because I don't think I'll be getting any free tickets to their Nashville concert.

I picked up two more Christmas CDs for my collection yesterday. One is a novelty disc called "A TV Christmas Dinner" and the other is "The Andy Williams Christmas Album," which had been on my wish list for a while. I haven't listened to the novelty disc yet but I popped the Andy CD into the player while we were still in the parking lot at McKay's. My son and I noticed that the first six songs were all secular and the next six were all religious. I guess that when the album was first released on vinyl, the secular songs were on side A and the religious songs were on side B.



Before becoming a famous radio deejay, my friend Bean worked in a record store in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC. It was around this time of year when a gentleman came into the store and asked Bean for help locating the Andy Williams Christmas albums. Bean immediately says "Andy Williams? Isn't he dead?" That's when Andy Williams said, "No. I'm not." It turns out that the musicians needed to hear some of the original arrangements for Andy's performance at the Kennedy Center.