How the Best Session Musicians, a Few Girl Groups, and a Convicted Murderer Made the Greatest Christmas Album of All Time

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know. 

Now that Thanksgiving 2025 is in our collective rearviews, we’ve entered one of the most consistent musical periods of the year: Christmas Music Season. Every store speaker, every underperforming FM and AM radio station, most coffeehouse playlists, and your aunt’s Spotify shares on Facebook are wall-to-wall with the usual suspects. You know them like you know the back of your hand: Bublé. Mariah. That one Kelly Clarkson song. The Paul McCartney song that everyone pretends to hate, but which is actually better than John’s Xmas canon. The possibly mythical Trans-Siberian Orchestra. The definitely mythical Bob Dylan Christmas album.

But there is one Christmas album that stands above all else. Not only is it the greatest Christmas album of all time, it’s the best album ever overseen by a specific producer, the maximal masterpiece of his sound and vibe. It’s one of the best albums of the ‘60s, period. That album is, of course, A Christmas Gift to You From Phil Spector.

Released on the unfortunate date of November 22, 1963—aka the day JFK was assassinated—A Christmas Gift to You was the first LP that Phil Spector made from start to finish as an LP. LPs had of course been around for a long time by then, but in the rock and pop genres, they were usually treated as clearinghouses for hit singles, and were often filled out by covers, or other throwaways. The Beatles were about to change that perception, but the Beach Boys and Spector were in L.A., and about to come to the same conclusion: the LP could be a cohesive body of work by an artist.

Prior to 1963, Spector had been considered a producer wunderkind who made hit single after hit single for a variety of girl groups and bands, earning him the “Titan of Teen” moniker for his ability to make records that Baby Boomer teens and tweens loved. Spector had been crafting what would become his signature sonic calling card: The Wall of Sound. In the early ‘60s, recording consoles often had a max of four or eight tracks, meaning that if you needed to mic more than four or eight different sounds on a song, you needed to stack them on single tracks. Spector did what was then unthinkable: he’d stack three piano players playing the same melody, three to five guitarists playing the same riff, and double drummers and have many percussionists at once. This sound is familiar to you if you’ve heard basically any early ‘60s song: It quickly became the norm for anything recorded in L.A. with session musicians. Here’s an easy example:

Hear how the sound of the band comes to you like a sledgehammer, like a linebacker on a crossing route in the open field. Spector achieved this largely by employing a group of L.A. session musicians who’d later be named “The Wrecking Crew.” They were the house band of L.A., appearing on literally hundreds of Top 40 hits. For decades they were the literal sound of pop and rock, yet none of them were household names. A documentary from 2008 tried to change that.

Back 1963, Spector had built his Wall of Sound, and built out the roster of Philles Records, a boutique label he had started a few years before. It was the perfect time for a label showcase, and Christmas gave them the perfect repertoire.

A Christmas Gift For You opens with its biggest solo star: Darlene Love. Love had signed to Philles as a solo artist, but most of her songs before this album were credited to a girl group she wasn’t even a part of, the Crystals. So this album was her coming out party, and she delivers on four of the albums 13 tracks. She opens with a whirling “White Christmas,” finishes side one with a sweet “Marshmallow World,” and delivers the defining version of “Winter Wonderland.” But it’s on the album’s one brand new Christmas carol that she shines the most: “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” a song that would become a standard in the 60 years since the album was released. It’s the kind of Christmas song we can all relate to—that yearning for a family member to come to the holiday celebration—in an era before everyone was able to get cross-country on flights multiple times a day. It became such a standard that David Letterman had Love perform it every year on his talk shows for over 20 years.

Love also served as a member of Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, another Spector-produced group, this time centered around the vocals of Bobby Sheen. They tackle “The Bells of St. Marys,” a composition from 1917, showing that Spector could do his thing over any song, and “Here Comes Santa Claus.”  The album is closed by Spector and his artists for an instrumental “Silent Night,” where Spector shares his well-wishes and thanks for the album. It comes off as sincere and like Spector is a humble, normal guy, which feels all the more jarring when you have the last 60 years to know what he was really like in the studio and at home.  

The albums other six tracks are some of the best girl group recordings ever made; Spector’s Wall of Sound came alive in ways it didn’t always when it was augmented by a crew of women harmonizing. The Crystals, Spector’s first hit group on his label, do “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” like it’s Paul Revere calling out the invading British, and immortalize “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” the year before the groundbreaking animated film cemented the department store creation in the collective unconscious. They also get “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers,” probably the most skipped over Christmas song on any Christmas album ever.

The Ronettes deliver the album’s other three songs. Their “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” was copied by the Jackson 5 and Motown five years later, and their “Frosty the Snowman” still feels like the most definitive. But the album’s best song—and only charting single—is far and away “Sleigh Ride,” which should show how good that song is. It’s hard to point out any individual highlight without it just becoming a list, so I’ll do that. The horse hoof percussion. The twinkling piano. The gunshot snare drums, that pause before every verse that feels like shooting down a slide. The harmonies! The bells that sound like chimes. Ronnie Spector’s attitude on the chorus. It’s a song that feels like Christmas but also rules as a song. It’s a rarity in Christmas music: an aesthetic achievement that also hits all the notes you want a Christmas song to. Here’s the music video for fun/paying proper respects:

I guess what I’m trying to say is that somehow, a guy who was later convicted of murder, the literal best session musicians of all time, and a few girl groups and backing singers coalesced in 1963 and made the best Christmas album of all time. So, instead of subjecting yourself to the same old Christmas playlist, take A Christmas Gift for You home this year.

--Andrew Winistorfer