Joe Gibbs Reggae Christmas, Joe Gibbs Family of Artists (VP Records)

I first encountered this record back about 1983 in a Jamaican bodega in Toronto's Kensington Market. (Wikipedia has this as a 1979 original release.) I managed to get a couple of cuts from it onto my holiday mix tapes before the sucker warped like a Lay's potato chip. It took until 2007 for it to be reissued in the digital realm, on CD and as a downloadable album. It remains as good as I remembered it, heavier-sounding than the vintage reggae Christmas albums from Trojan that are endlessly reissued. The centerpiece of the album is a pair of 11-minute carol medleys, which might be a bit much for disc mixers but they no doubt go whizzing by when you're passing the dutchie on the left-hand side for the whole time. Beres Hammond is featured on "Winter Wonderland" and Horace Andy is credited on "O Little Town of Bethlehem." They also work out on the "12 Days of Christmas," get a little clavinet action going on "We Three Kings" and go a bit uptempo on what appears to be the album's only original, "Let X-mas Catch You In a Good Mood." This might sound a little sedate to those used to today's hip-hop flavored varieties of reggae and reggaeton, but it never hurts to get back to the roots.