Various Artists THE AMERICAN SONG-POEM CHRISTMAS (Bar-None)

The "song-poems" of the ’60s and ’70s — in which Jane and John Q. Public, visions of stardom dancing in their heads, mailed their scribbled doggerel to a studio where session hacks put the lyrics to music in one take and mailed back a 45 rpm single — represent a phenomenon by turns endearingly charming and appallingly tacky. Much like Christmas itself. But if a song poem’s banged-out instrumentation typifies cynical commerce, its words are earnest self-expression, evincing a childlike guilelessness in grown-ups that’s apropos of the holidays. In "Santa Claus Goes Modern" (covered by "outsider art" fans Yo La Tengo for give-away at their annual Hanukkah eight-night stands), studio sirens "Bobbie Boyle and the Singers" croon to a listless Bacharach-Carpenters groove about a Saint Nick who trades up his sleigh for a flying saucer. It’s a different vehicle in "Santa Came on a Nuclear Missile," whose ominous sound effects and queasy ’80s synths conjure Reagan-era paranoia about Xmas extinction. "Merry Christmas Polka" exhorts the faithful to "dance the night away . . . it’s Christ’s birthday." (Santa, meanwhile, tosses back a couple cold ones.)

Then there’s "Daddy, Is Santa Really Six Foot Four?" and its dark intimations of murderous infidelity: "His deer must have been stuck in the snow, ’cos, Daddy, he was driving a Monte Carlo," shrieks a painfully out-of-tune Tony Tennille wanna-be. "Is it true that he carries a torch for Momma — and a gun for you?" But the beauty of the season is captured in "Snowbows," as a castrato John Denver type warbles slo-mo over goopy strings as if his eggnog had been spiked with psychotropics. "If rain can make a rainbow, with colors way up high, then snow can make a snowbow, you’ll see them if you try." Somewhere, Santa and Baby Jesus are singing along.