We're all force-fed holiday cheer from Halloween through New Year's, and even if you really, really love Christmas music, hearing the same old standards and modern classics over and over again can begin to fill you with exactly the opposite of holiday cheer. To avoid the monotony of those soft-rockin' jingle-bellin' classics, we present ten non-traditional holiday songs that are actually pretty good.

Bishop Allen, "You'll Never Find My Christmas"
This track was released on The Christmas Gig, a fourteen-song album produced by Target and available for free download here. The whole album is worth a listen, but "You'll Never Find My Christmas" is by far the most fun.

...it even inspired a cute Target commercial.

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Now That's What I Call Christmas: Lady Gaga under the tree

(In December, we'll be posting holiday jams for your enjoyment. Have any favorites you want featured? E-mail me.)

Two months after the release of her debut, The Fame, Lady Gaga released a single called "Christmas Tree."

The bizarre, euphemism-rich, nontraditional take on Christmas didn't gain much notice -- at least for something Gaga-related -- and it was never released domestically beyond the single.

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Can we just agree that Hanukkah food kicks all sorts of ass over Hanukkah music? Yes, yes, yes, there's "The Hanukkah Song". Let me tell you about "The Hanukkah Song." It's the Hanukkah version of "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer": amusing the first time you hear it, exponentially more annoying every time thereafter. The song that probably best expresses the American Jewish experience in December is "A Jew on Christmas" from South Park. Except for one thing: There's absolutely nothing wrong with eating latkes. Latkes, the Yiddish term for potato pancakes, are awesome!

The wonderful thing about Hanukkah is that since it celebrates how a tiny vial of oil miraculously lasted eight days (after an equally-miraculous defeat of the Syrian Greek army by a ragtag bunch of Jewish guerrillas), it offers a built-in excuse to eat oil. Or, rather, since oil doesn't taste that good on its own, foods fried in oil.

Think about it: an entire eight-day-long holiday devoted to the consumption of fried food! (Well, OK, and exchanging presents and lighting an eight-branched candelabra and playing a ridiculously-boring gambling game with a spinning top called a dreidel.) What could be any better than that?

Nonetheless, every year, somebody tries to reinvent Hanukkah music or write a new classic Hanukkah song or something. Last year, Orrin Hatch did the honors. This year a music writer named Marc Weidenbaum asked some of his DJ friends to do remixes of Hebrew and Yiddish Hanukkah classics and compiled the results into an album called Anander Mol, Anander Veig, available for download at Tablet Magazine.

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If you don't understand the meaning of Hanukkah, fear not! In this video, the brave Maccabeats, an a cappella group at Yeshiva University in New York, re-enact the Hanukkah story and other important rites of the holiday, including menorah-lighting, latke-flipping and dreidel-playing, to their rendition of the song "Candlelight," a takeoff of Taio Cruz's "Dynamite."

As my cousin-by-marriage who grew up Catholic says, "Oh...NOW I get it!"

Clownvis Presley presents: Christmas in Hollywood!

Clownvis is a lot of things: a clown, an Elvis impersonator, a wedding officiator, a burlesque emcee, a controversial television show contestant, a nice dude. If there's one thing he's not, however, it's traditional.

Thus, the Clownvis Presley Christmas in Hollywood EP. The EP is Clownvis' holiday gift to all the naughty little girls and boys. It can be downloaded for free here.

Christmas in Hollywood takes on traditional songs in a way only the king of clowns could -- ad-libbing lyrics to classics such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" while singing in that signature drawl. He also wrote an original piece for the album, "Jesus Christ Eatin' On a Chicken Wing," which you can check out after the jump.

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(Every day in December, we'll be posting holiday jams for your enjoyment. Have any favorites you want featured? Email me.)

Hoboken, New Jersey, noisemongers Yo La Tengo are known for their (mostly) annual Hanukkah residency, where special guests and pals join the trio in seasonal merriment. In honor of the first night of Hanukkah, A to Z presents some vintage live YLT footage. This particular cover of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" has a local bent: It was filmed at old Cicero's in 1987, ostensibly for the show Psychotic Reaction. (Another video from that same session, "House Fall Down," is below.)

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