I have a playlist called “Tolerable Xmas Music.” As you may imagine, it isn’t super long. But I hold out hope that every season there will be some new gift to add to the playlist.

If you’re looking to make your own not-totally-awful holiday playlist or add new songs to an established one, here are a few fresh and evergreen ideas.

“The Christmas Song” Nat King Cole

Are there a dozen Christmas albums you can listen to from top to bottom? Maybe. Is there a single Christmas album you can listen to from top to bottom? Definitely.

Nat King Cole does all the obvious songs — “Deck the Halls,” “Joy to the World,” “Silent Night.” And often he does them with too-obvious arrangements (that carolers chorus can be a bit overbearing). But Cole’s voice and those lush strings are the audio equivalent of dreaming of dancing sugar plums.

Even when corny, the whole album is jolly fun. When restrained and delicate — such as on signature Cole tune “The Christmas Song” — the mood is sweet, tender, with just a dash of needed introspection and melancholy. To really dive into the dreamy world that is Cole’s pipes, the best-selling Christmas album of the ’60s has been reissued as a limited-edition vinyl set through Interscope-Capitol Records Definitive Sound Series

“What’s So Bad About Christmas,” the Hilken and Melissa Band with Kay Hanley

With Letters To Cleo’s Kay Hanley fronting the Hilken and Melissa band, the group delivers a Christmas nugget somewhere between a Ronettes gem and Go-Go’s romp. On the tune, written by Hilken’s band Fuzzy, the vocals are too cheery not to love, the melody too magic not to hum along with.

We get like one or two new Christmas songs a year that can be slotted between “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and “Christmas Wrapping,” it’s great that a 2025 edition comes from locals. For the full local factor, see the song live at A Very FUNdraising Xmas! Sunday at the Burren in Davis Square.

“A Charlie Brown Christmas,” Vince Guaraldi

The weirdest thing about the old Charlie Brown specials, and there were so many weird things about them, was that the soundtracks doubled as amazing jazz albums.

Vince Guaraldi’s iconic “Linus and Lucy” theme feels both simple and complex, a marriage of classic stride piano and revved up West Coast jazz — and his other originals have an equal depth, see “Skating.” But it’s the sad-happy-sad stuff, the why-is-something-this-lonely-but-bright-in–a-kids-show stuff, that makes for surprising holiday music.

Guaraldi’s piano reinventions of standards often cut out the merry but kept the magic. He begins “O Tannenbaum” mournfully, then lightly kicks it up and makes it swing, then spins out a run of notes you could find on a Chick Corea record. He takes “The Christmas Song” and “Greensleaves” on similar journeys. This is the soundtrack that launched more jazz fans “Kind of Blue.”

“Broke For Christmas,” D-Tension

You may know D-Tension as one of Massachusetts’ great hip hop producers. You may know the Lowell local from his DJ work, his forays into electronica, or his flirtations with Van Halen-style metal. You don’t know him from country or Christmas music. Or at least you didn’t.

“As a person who uses humor in all of my art, one of my biggest musical influences was 80’s Sunday night TV, ‘Hee Haw,’ ‘Sha Na Na,’ ‘The Muppet Show’ and ‘Lawrence Welk,” he told the Herald. “For this single, I pictured a Christmas song you might see on ‘Hee Haw.’ While I am best known as a hip hop artist, at this point I’ve jumped from rap to new wave to punk to rock to country.”

Hear D-Tension do the song live in Lowell on Dec. 23 at the annual Texmas Eve show at the Worthen.

(Photo courtesy Rum Bar Records)
(Photo courtesy Interscope-Capitol Records Definitive Sound Series)