Thank you, Santa Claus! It isn’t often that I enjoy a new vocal album so much that I assume it’s a present arriving directly from St. Nick to moi. But that’s just the case with Diana Krall’s “Christmas Songs” (Verve 4717).

Normally, I tend to champion contemporary singers who come up with original styles that push old songs in a new direction; Ms. Krall’s previous release, “The Girl in the Other Room,” was a successful attempt to go contemporary via singer-songwriter-type material.This new release, however, is old school with a vengeance.

I started enjoying the album even before I heard any songs.There are glorious photos of Ms. Krall in Christmasy red and green gowns all over the CD booklet, and the LP edition (Classic Fr 4717) offers even more visual treats (the record is pressed on green vinyl). Whereas Ms. Krall looks deadly serious on most of her other album covers, the back cover of “Christmas Songs” has her facing the camera with a wideopen smile, looking like she’s having a blast. Most of the music reflects that same sense of joyful abandon.

In 1998, Ms. Krall released a threesong EP of Christmas music, which featured her original guitarist, Russell Malone, and Johnny Mandel’s orchestrations. The two ballads from that set – “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and the Charlie Brown Christmas song, “Christmas Time Is Here” – are included on the new album. The other 10 songs here feature saxophonist Jeff Clayton and drummer Jeff Hamilton’s orchestra.

A highlight is an up-tempo version of “Jingle Bells.” Scat has never been one of Ms. Krall’s strong points, but the brief scat episodes here work wonderfully. She seems genuinely carefree and doesn’t even care that no one will understand her apparently spontaneous tag in the coda, “I’m just crazy ’bout horses.” (Personally, I think it’s a reference to a famous Ella Fitzgerald lick.) She also seems to be thoroughly enjoying herself when she switches a line in “Winter Wonderland” from “the Eskimo way” to “the Canadian way.”

Ms. Krall’s forte is melancholy, and she shows off her expertise on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” But her sad songs sound much more moving now that she is contrasting them with happy ones. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” follows an emotional arch wherein she sounds more wide-eyed and innocent when describing “snow and mistletoe and presents ‘neath the tree” but returns to a bleaker outlook as she realizes this Christmas is “only in my dreams.”

Sixty years ago, “Home for Christmas” was an anthem that perfectly reflected the separation of servicemen from their loved ones; Ms. Krall shows us how relevant it is to the families of the forces fighting in the current war as well.

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Michael Feinstein asks the same question every year as part of his Christmas show at the club that bears his name: Why are there no great Chanukah songs? The simple answer is that the goyim don’t care and the Jews are too busy writing Christmas songs. (It’s only a matter of time before we see the first Klezmer Christmas album hit shelves with a title like “Oy Vey in a Manger.”) But “Chanukah in Santa Monica,” a witty piece by musical comic Tom Lehrer, fills the gap quite nicely, using the theme of spending Jewish holidays in rather untraditional places as inspiration for some hilarious rhymes – “Shevuous in East St. Louis,” “Yom Kippuh in Mississippuh,” “Rosh Hashonah in Arizona.” The songwriter’s own recording was included on his three-CD box set, “The Remains of Tom Lehrer,” but you can hear Mr. Feinstein sing it if you go to his club before the end of the year.

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On the subject of strange Christmas recordings, I was digging through my record collection the other day and came across “I Want To Spend Christmas With Elvis.” There was a lot of star power behind this eminently forgettable novelty which strings together early Presley hits in semisatiric fashion (“Heartbreak Noel,” “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Reindeer”). The piece was written by two future pop giants, producer Don Kirschner and singer Bobby Darin, and performed by two important jazz names, Marlene VerPlanck (singing under the pseudonym “Debbie Dabney”) and her future husband, Savoy Records staff arranger Billy Ver-Planck. Incidentally, having exhumed a record Mrs.VerPlanck would just as soon forget, it seems only fair to plug one she wants the world to know about, her excellent latest album, “Now” (Audiophile 330).

“I Want To Spend Christmas With Elvis” appears on the out-of-print Savoy anthology “Mr. Santa’s Boogie.” Another song is “Santa’s Secret” (aka “Santa Claus Is Smokin’ Reefer”), a 1944 recording by pianist Johnny Guarnieri. Best known to jazz history for filling in for Count Basie on several key sessions with Lester Young, Guarnieri here posits himself as a rather serviceable substitute for Fats Waller, both as a two-fisted stride keyboardist and as a slyly fey vocalist.

In between frequently exclaiming “Yes! Yes!” in a Fats-ish fashion, Guarnieri, accompanied by bassist Slam Stewart and drummer Sam Weiss, depicts how “Santa Claus is smokin’ reefer” – in fact, it’s a giant Christmas tree of a reefer, 100 feet long. These days, it’s considered inappropriate to poke fun at narcotics use, and this song, depicting Santa as something of a pusher who distributes marijuana to kiddies, is beyond the pale. But Guarnieri does a hysterical and convincing job of portraying an archetypical pothead unable to remember the lyrics as he goes along.