Christmas Eve with Johnny Mathis
| Christmas Eve with Johnny Mathis | ||||
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| Studio album by Johnny Mathis | ||||
| Released | September 23, 1986 | |||
| Recorded | 1986 at One on One Studios, North Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, Conway Studios, Hollywood, California, Ocean Way Recording, Hollywood, California |
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| Length | 33:28 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Denny Diante | |||
| Johnny Mathis chronology | ||||
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| Alternate cover | ||||
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
| People | negative |
Christmas Eve with Johnny Mathis is a Christmas album by American pop singer Johnny Mathis that was released in September 1986 by Columbia Records. This was Mathis's fourth holiday-themed LP and focused exclusively on secular material.
The album spent a week on Billboard magazine's Christmas Albums chart in the issue dated December 12, 1992, (no such chart was published in 1986) and two weeks on its Top Pop Catalog Albums chart in December 1994.
The recording of "Jingle Bells" on this release is subtitled "(Let's Take a Sleigh Ride)" on the front and back covers of the album jacket. (The CD booklet does not include song titles on the cover.) The track opens with background vocalists singing, "Let's take a sleigh ride, a merry sleigh ride," and the subtitle is inserted into each refrain of the chorus. Although no credit for additional lyrics is cited, the credit for the arranger of this rendition, Ray Ellis, is listed with the songwriter's name on the LP label.
The album's opener, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas", was featured in the 1992 holiday release Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and included on its original soundtrack album. In the issue of Billboard dated November 28, 2009, the list of the "Top 10 Holiday Songs (Since 2001)" places the Mathis recording at number 10.
People magazine's reviewer, Ralph Novak, describes Mathis's singing on the album as "characteristically smooth, yet never very engaged", and feels that the arrangements "tend to big stringy orchestrations that are too much for intimacy and not passionate enough for majesty."
"Jingle Bells" is the oldest of the songs that Mathis covers here and was published under the name "The One Horse Open Sleigh" in 1857. "Toyland" originated in the 1903 operetta Babes in Toyland, and "Happy Holiday" was first performed in the 1942 film Holiday Inn.Perry Como and the Fontane Sisters reached number 19 on Billboard magazine's Records Most Played by Disc Jockeys chart and number 23 on its list of the Best-Selling Pop Singles of the week in 1951 with the first recording of "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas".Peggy Lee's rendition of "It's Christmas Time Again" was released in 1953, and "Caroling, Caroling" first appeared on the 1954 LP The Christmas Mood by The Columbia Choir.
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