A Christmas Yuleblog

The 2009 Christmas downloading season is under way. I'm saddened to learn that my friend Ernie (Not Bert) had a computer hard drive crash and burn (I feel your pain - same thing happened to me five years ago.) Don't fret - his collection is so huge that anything he posts is worth a first or second look. In my case, it's the 203rd look. Two days in and there are new releases all over the place. If you haven't bookmarked it yet, Santas Working Overtime does just that - finding all these new releases and highlighting them faster than any RSS feed can ever hope to do. During these same two days, I discovered that two albums I was preparing to share... were already shared out! The first is this amazing chestnut: Recorded in 1954, this 10" was the first full-length Christmas album for Messrs. Ferrante and Teicher. All of the eight songs on this album were later re-released on their " Adventures In Carols " album from 1956 (available to download...

If there's a site online that sells Christmas CDs or records, I have notifications that come in to alert me of new items for sale. Every morning, I'm alerted by eBay , GEMM , and Musicstack to many new items - some good, some bad, and some I've seen too many times (people still think those Goodyear & Firestone Christmas LPs will sell online!). So it came as a shock when two months ago, I received a notification for this very CD you're looking at from the good folks at Half.com . I used to go visit Half many years ago - even sold some VHS tapes when VHS was still in vogue over there - and made some quality purchases along the way. When eBay purchased Half.com back in 2000, they planned to integrate it into eBay and eventually close down Half.com. But eBay chose to keep it running separate primarily for the textbook market and (travesty of all travesties) Half does not accept PayPal - credit card only. Needless to say, when this showed on Half, I went diggi...