The title might be immodest, but it’s accurate. Just about every holiday song parody and comedy sketch you can imagine is jimmied onto this hilarious, sprawling collection. While you’ll find a smattering of well-known Christmas wackiness (including \”Grandma Got Run over by a Reindeer\” and the Singing Dogs’ \”Jingle Bells\”), the Doctor’s specialty is unearthing the obscure, such as Wild Man Fischer’s weirder-than-weird \”I Am a Christmas Tree.\” You’ll never listen to \”The 12 Days of Christmas\” quite the same way after hearing the spins put on the tale by both Allan Sherman and Bob and Doug McKenzie, and you’re likely to check your Christmas cookie for \”special ingredients\” after hearing Cheech & Chong’s \”Santa Claus and His Old Lady.\” –David Sprague

Dr. Demento’s collection of Holiday novelty songs is a weird and wonderful find. Just when it looked like the genre had been trampled to death with the success of \”Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,\” the good Doctor shows us that there are richer (and funnier) X-mas musical parodies to enjoy.

Granted, some of these tracks are inevitable additions on Christmas discs that cover a specific era, or only include songs that were commercial successes: the tracks by the Chipmunks, Spike Jones and Elmo & Patsy are almost as tedious as a Kenny G Holiday collection. Fortunately, there are plenty of lesser-known gems here, like Gayla Peevey’s bouncy \”I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas\” and Tom Lehrer’s \”Christmas Carol,\” a witty and sharp commentary on Holiday commercialism.

This collections spans about 40 years, but the selections generally complement each other, rather than sound out of place. The humor of the material here also spans a wide area, from goofy-voiced tunes for kids to sly, insinuating musical parody. Some of the choices are obvious, but others are wonderfully inexplicable, like \”I’m A Christmas Tree\” and \”I Saw DADDY Kissing Santa Claus.\” Two of the more recent tracks (from Cheech & Chong and Weird Al Yankovic) are classics that appear (to my knowledge) in this collection only.