a sufjan stevens christmas

...for the past 4 years, christmas would not be christmas for me without some sufjan stevens. i was one of the lucky people who saw sufjan live before he hit the bigtime, and i was able to get a hold of actual copies of his first 3 homemade annual christmas EPs. this was back in 2002, when sufjan was little-known enough to personally respond to my email and ship me copies of the CDs himself. i always thought he’d make a killing if he issued his christmas albums properly, and that’s just what he and his asthmatic kitty family did last month. they seem to be selling really well, as amazon.com was out of copies when i checked today. by now, the number of his christmas albums has grown to 5, and just as i wished, instead of combining these EPs onto full-length CDs, he’s maintained the original form and order resulting in a beautiful box set complete w/ wordy liner notes, artwork, lyrics and chords so you can sing along, which is what these little gems were originally created for.

i think that the next step for sufjan and his friends would be to give concerts in which they play all the songs from these christmas albums from start to finish. it would be like a christmas rock opera. they would make soooooooooooooo much money. which they could then stuff into the tin container of the nearest salvation army bell-ringer.