You Just Gotta Love Christmas, Peter Cetera (Viastar/Golden Threads)

I've been looking a bit suspiciously at latter-day Christmas CDs by original album-rock era performers, simply because, well, they're my age or older and quite a few of them are happy to be middle-aged and mellow. So I approached this 2004 CD by the former Chicago bassist/vocalist carefully. (I'd heard about it earlier but hadn't actually run across a copy until recently.) It's not particularly rocked out in any meaningful way, definitely contemporary middle-of-the-road music. Still, we'll give him props for putting some thought behind this endeavor, with three originals and some outside-the-box approaches to arrangements. Not a trace of Spector on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," for example, but this version is a distinctive one nevertheless. "Deck the Halls" gets a bit of antique folk on the arrangement and a harmony vocal from Alison Krauss; he also duets "Blue Christmas" and "Winter Wonderland," this time with daughter Claire. The title song, an original, lacks only a horn section to take its place alongside Cetera's Chicago work. "Something That Santa Claus Left Behind" is a little sappy, but in the current era, "Alone For the Holidays" will ring true for a lot of women.