Christmas Dinner and Cocktails

Delta's straightforwardly named Christmas Dinner and Cocktails features two discs' worth of jazzy interpretations of holiday standards made for dinner and cocktail parties, as performed by the Yuletide Lounge Band. The group creates a mellow but festive mood on songs like "Santa Baby," "Silent Night," and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." Some of the tracks with vocals, such as "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and "The First Noel," are pleasant enough, but too distracting to really work as background music, which seems to be the intention of the rest of the collection. At any rate, Christmas Dinner and Cocktails is an adequate, but not outstanding, collection of Christmas party music that may fill the musical needs of your next holiday gathering.