When you hear yet another arrangement of “Deck the Halls” or “Santa Baby” in a store, do you merrily sing along? Or do you count the minutes till you can go home and enjoy your own record collection, with its true classics, its obscurities, and its limited-edition prestige?

If you were Sean Passmore, you wouldn’t have to choose. As Carsten Knox reports in The Coast, the Halifax record store employee is a Christmas music fanatic, with a personal collection of 2,000 Christmas albums. These include standards—Bing Crosby, Dolly Parton, Charlie Brown—along with less predictable fare: a bluegrass compilation from Sugar Hill Records, a collection of “song poems” with lyrics solicited via advertisement, a Mojo Nixon record called Horny Holidays.

After realizing that most of his friends owned no more than a couple of Christmas albums, Passmore started making personalized Christmas mix tapes for friends each fall—something he’s now been doing for more than 20 years. “People grow up with these albums—it’s the soundtrack to their childhood Christmas,” he explained to Knox. “People are always looking for them.”

(Thanks, AltWeeklies.com.)

—Steve Thorngate

Holiday music hounds us at this time of year, especially if we happen to be supermarket employees, whose days are overrun with the plinking and sighing of electronic, instrumental remixes of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” But it doesn’t stop there.

Writing on Mother Jones’ blog, The Riff, Gary Moskowitz brings our attention to other musical offenses of the holiday season, in particular the Monster Ballads Xmas CD. The record features stalwarts of the ’80s hair-metal scene, such as Cinderella and Dokken, performing classic holiday tunes. You can hear some of these delightful aural baubles on the album’s MySpace page.

If you’ve been drubbed into a stupor by “Comfort and Joy,” thereby nullifying the song’s upbeat message, you’re likely to feel only further drubbing at the hands of Monster Ballads Xmas. Nevertheless, the video for Dokken’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” also featured on the MySpace page, deserves a chuckle, as does Moskowitz’s important question: “When Tom Keifer of Cinderella sings ‘Blue Christmas,’ all I can think is, who the hell is Tom Keifer?” God bless, Gary, and amen. —Michael Rowe