W. T. Grant’s A Very Merry Christmas

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I didn’t have a very happy childhood, but some of my fondest memories from when I was young, memories which I cherish, are of baking Christmas cookies with my mother. I was in my early school days, starting around kindergarten or maybe before. I remember rolling out the dough on a round table in our kitchen and using cutouts to make the cookies we would then decorate. Thinking about it now, these are probably my happiest childhood memories.

While we’d be making the cookies, my mother would play Christmas music from some old records. They were compilation albums from the 1960s featuring artists of the day performing traditional Christmas songs. To this day it remains my favorite kind of Christmas music. In the years since then, I remembered two album covers specifically: one was a white cover featuring round Christmas tree ornaments with pictures of contemporary stars like Jim Nabors and Johnny Mathis, who appeared on the album, inside the ornaments; the other, which I was sure was called A Very Merry Christmas, had a picture of a small child in a room lit by a fireplace, looking up the chimney.

I spent years as an adult looking for the latter album, hoping it had been released on CD. I scoured the internet but couldn’t find a trace of it. Finally, a few years ago, I found out why.

I found a blog (one of many, it turns out) devoted to Christmas music released on vinyl. This blog had information about both albums I mentioned, and it turns out they were part of a series released by a now-defunct department store named W. T. Grant (sometime's referred to as Grant's). That's why they had never been released on CD. With this information, I was finally able to obtain these albums -- not only the two that I've mentioned, but the other six in the series that I hadn't known about -- and I have MP3 copies of them which I've listened to every year since. The MP3s sound like the vinyl, along with all the pops and imperfections, and I love it. Here are the front covers to all eight albums.









There's a website which sells CDs and MP3 of the albums. They get around the legality issues by including the vinyl albums with purchases of the CDs, and requiring you to own the albums for the MP3 purchases. You can find these albums, and a lot more, at https://christmaslpstocd.com/.

It's great being able to listen to these again, and I actually prefer them with the vinyl sound quality. These albums take me back to a very happy time.

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