I have a new favorite Christmas album

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the Michael W. Smith marketing guys giving away his new Christmas CD to bloggers. Right before we went into the hospital, my CD came in the mail and got stuck in a pile on the kitchen table as I frantically packed and prepared for the surgery.

I found it again a few days ago and set it by the sound system (aka, the TV, Xbox, and small speaker system). The instructions were to do something Christmassy while listening to the CD and write a blog post about it. So I was dutifully waiting for a time when we got to actually do something Christmassy. Of course, I would pass the CD periodically and gaze longingly at it. Finally yesterday we were doing a quick housecleaning before some friends came over to play and I caved in and put the CD on.

Can we just pause for a moment in reverent silence? That man has talent!

I was a bit worried since the last time we saw MWS in concert, he was going through a very unfortunate midlife crisis where he was trying waaaay too hard to be hip and cool and ended up looking like a bad high school cheerleader wannabe. He has thankfully come back from the Dark Side and returned to his strengths of big orchestra and choir, which is why I loved him and faithfully went to his Christmas concerts with Amy Grant back in Dallas. He is an amazing performer and composer. Back when I was in high school band, we performed one of his pieces that was my absolute favorite. It was called Musical Instruments (appropriate!) and the melody was carried by the mallet instruments (marimba, xylophone, etc.), which I played (in fact, I was captain of the sideline crew, but that's just bragging). The drill team had chosen the music and one time they asked us to play it while we were all sitting in the stands at a football game. Ummm, that would be difficult as the mallet instruments were stacked on the sideline since it's kinda hard to carry a *marimba* up in the stands and we were the *only* instruments that had the melody line. They persisted so we went down and pushed our keyboards up right in front of the band and we played it. Cause we were just nice like that.

Anyhoo, back to Christmas. I put that CD in, started cleaning, then the music almost brought a tear to my eye. I put that sucker on repeat and listened to it like 4 times in a row. When our friends arrived, I just turned it down a little and kept on enjoying it. It's not just a bunch of weird versions of traditional Christmas songs, it's actually new and very well written music. So if you're looking for something new this Christmas, *buy this one*. Michael W. Smith, It's a Wonderful Christmas.