🎧 Album Details
Artist: Bob Dylan
Album: Christmas In The Heart
Label: Columbia
Released: October 13, 2009
UK Album Chart: 40
US Billboard 200: 23
Produced: Jack Frost (Bob Dylan’s pseudonym)
File Under: Dylan Does Christmas!
There are many questions in life with no clear answers.
Why are there instructions on shampoo bottles?
Who keeps greenlighting Mrs Brown’s Boys?
And, crucially…
Why did Bob Dylan make a Christmas album?
Not a left-field, ironic, subversive Christmas album either.
No protest carols.
No ironic rewrites.
No harmonica-led takedown of capitalism at Christmas.
No — Christmas in the Heart is Bob Dylan playing it completely straight.
That somehow makes it even funnier.
Which makes it one of the strangest records ever released by a Nobel Prize winner.
🎅 The Voice (Let’s Address It Early)
By 2009, Dylan’s voice had settled into that familiar sandpaper-and-gravel phase — like Santa Claus gargling a bag of nails.
On paper, this should not work with songs like Silent Night or Here Comes Santa Claus.
And yet… somehow… it does.
Not because it’s beautiful.
But because it’s Bob Dylan committing fully to sounding like a haunted snowman who’s seen some things.
🎶 The Songs
The standard is set with a rousing “Here Comes Santa Claus” to open proceedings.
You get a treasure trove of festive standards:
- Little Drummer Boy
- Hark the Herald Angels Sing
- Winter Wonderland
- Must Be Santa (which sounds like Dylan trapped inside a deranged children’s TV show)
There’s no reinvention here.
No genre twists.
No ironic distance.
This is Dylan lovingly recreating the Christmas albums he probably grew up with — crooners, choirs, sleigh bells and all.
It’s sincere.
Almost unsettlingly so.
And I love every second of it. An eternal seasonal fave for me. I take this one at face value. It does what it says on the tin.
🎄 The Vibe
This album feels like it was recorded in a cabin, surrounded by tinsel, eggnog, and ghosts of Christmases past.
It’s nostalgic in a way that’s oddly touching.
Like Dylan isn’t trying to be clever — he’s just paying tribute to a version of America that only exists on old vinyl and black-and-white TV specials.
And once you accept that, it kind of… wins you over.
🎁 Final Thoughts
Christmas in the Heart shouldn’t work.
On paper, it’s ridiculous.
And yet:
- It’s earnest
- It’s warm
- It’s completely un-ironic
- And it’s oddly comforting once you surrender to it
This isn’t Dylan reinventing Christmas.
It’s Dylan joining it, croak and all.
A baffling festive detour.
A Christmas curio.
And somehow… a weirdly lovable one.
The Listening Log 
Leave a comment