At Gambit‘s blog, Alison Fensterstock has been posting strange Christmas songs daily. I’m not going to bust on her for that because I’m currently downloading a disco Christmas album that she recommended today. Still, goofing on Christmas is awfully easy. It’s sentimental and square if not by history, then by modern practice.

The other end of the spectrum from Alison’s Christmas collection is Appalachian Christmas, a lovely, 100 percent irony-free set of instrumental Christmas songs played by a trio of sidemen (and women) from Nashville. There’s nothing to recommend it but tasteful arrangements and performances that treat these classic melodies with restraint, affection and reverence, but not so much of any of those to render the album timid or redundant.

Personally, I like the balance of something like this next to Julian Koster’s singing saw, which is the yin to Appalachian Christmas‘ yang – one clever, conceptual, post-modern and guarded in an armor of hipness, while the other is disarming in its plainspokenness.