MITCHELL KEZIN walks into a New York city record shop and asks if they have any Christmas vinyl in stock. “I find it perverse that you're asking,” the clerk responds. Such is the life of the Christmas music collector. Kezin, a self-professed holiday music obsessive, has spent decades meticulously rifling through record collections on the hunt for Christmas classics. He's used to sideways glances and derision from “real” music lovers. Interactions such as this one are the reason Kezin, and others like him, have long remained in the “Christmas closet.”

There is no worse music, we are told, than bad Christmas music. And yet each year, it seems, we must suffer through a Justin Bieber Christmas album or festive Rod Stewart release. But buried deep beneath the holiday hits that radio DJs spin on heavy rotation is a seemingly endless, virtually unknown canon of alternative, even subversive, Christmas ...