The Christmas Album (Lynn Anderson Album)

The Christmas Album (Lynn Anderson Album)

The Christmas Album is the name of a Holiday music album by Country music singer Lynn Anderson released in 1971.

This was Lynn Anderson's first Christmas music album. The album was released by Columbia Records, and was very successful. The album reached No. 13 on the "Billboard 200" in 1971 (her highest chart position on that chart), but it didn't chart on the "Top Country Albums" list, since Christmas albums were not counted as "country" by Billboard during this period.

The album, a mix of secular uptempo Christmas classics and new songs from several of the leading Nashville country music songwriters of the day was enormously popular and became a Christmas classic itself among country music and American popular music fans. The album's opening song "Ding-A-Ling the Christmas Bell" was released as a single and at one point considered as a possible Christmas cartoon special but the project never got off the ground.

The album was in print for a decade and, in the 1990s, Sony released limited quantities on CD with new cover art (the image shown above). The CD has since become a collector's item and fetches high sums when it appears up for auction on ebay and Amazon.com. The CD includes over 100 five-star reviews from fans pleading for the CD's re-release, which to date has not happened.

Anderson would later release a second Christmas album in 2002 Home for the Holidays, a project reportedly inspired by the ebay frenzy for her earlier Holiday album.