When Blue Rodeo started talking about recording a Christmas album, they knew from the start that it wasn’t going to sound like your grandfather’s well-worn holiday favourites. Rather than just dipping into a dried up well of songs previously recorded hundreds of times, the band chose instead to mine for material off the beaten path. Thus, alongside a couple of Christmas classics, we have unexpected covers coming from artists as diverse as Big Star, Merle Haggard, Gordon Lightfoot and Paul Simon. The album also features a new track, “Home To You This Christmas,” written by Jim Cuddy and a re-recording of Greg Keelor’s “Glad To Be Alive” which originally appeared on the album Palace of Gold.

“The songs are as much about the season as they are about the actual day,” says Jim Cuddy. “The criteria for choosing material were to find songs that we could actually sing and make our own.”

The striking cover for A Merrie Christmas To You is an illustration drawn by Greg Keelor’s great-uncle Arthur Keelor who once worked designing greeting cards at Raus & Mann in the 1920’s alongside members of the fabled Group of Seven.

“I found a lot of his art at his house when my father and his brother were clearing it out after my aunt and uncle had died’” remembers Keelor. “I always loved his art and when Jim said he wanted to do a Christmas album, I thought I have all of these Christmas cards he had designed so being able to use one for the cover an others inside the artwork was a real treat.”