What makes a great Christmas song? There’s an alchemy to finding the winning combination of whimsy and humour, juxtaposed with a healthy slice of Christmas angst. This formula has led us to spin the same handful of pop bangers that endure down the decades, soundtracking generation after generation of tinsel and mince pies.

It’s astounding to think that given the commercial basis for their whole existence, The Monkees have never released a Christmas album before now. However, it’s a shame that they have waited until the death of one of their number to put out Christmas Party. Even that hasn’t prevented Davy Jones, who passed away in 2012, from performing lead vocals on two of the tunes though.

And so, with one last speech on the importance of kindness, Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat bid farewell to the TARDIS. In their final Doctor Who episode, Twice Upon a Time subverted expectations with a small, sweet adventure which valued character above plot.

The official reissue of The Beatles’ Christmas records is a major event. Since Live at the BBC was issued in 1994, archive Beatles’ releases have fallen into two categories.

Faced with yet another new work premiered by the Borodin Quartet, Shostakovich asked a daunting question: "but have you played all of Haydn's quartets yet?". Of course they hadn't, and felt justly rebuked.

Just when you can scarcely move for Messiahs, two Christmas Oratorios came along at once on Saturday night. That’s London concert schedules for you. While John Butt and his Dunedin Consort unwrapped four of the cantatas at the Wigmore Hall, Vladimir Jurowski presented all six. Was it too much of a good thing?

The familiar doesn’t have to get old. Last night at the Coliseum there were children in the boxes, adults in the circle and grandparents in the stalls.

The music business is about to disappear on holiday wholesale and we won’t see hide nor hair of it until mid-January. There’s just time for one last 2017 vinyl celebration. Regular readers should be warned that theartsdesk on Vinyl becomes rather easy-going at this time of year – must be all the Baileys – and prone to making allowances for the odd sliver of cheese and office-party silliness.

French stylist Gaspard Royant has recorded at London’s garage-rock-central studio Toe Rag and been produced by Edwyn Collins. Both fit a worldview which encompasses collaborating with Eli Paperboy Reed, who crops up here on “Christmas Time Again”, a cover of Reuben Anderson’s wonderful, soulful 1966 ska single. Drawing a line between garage rock, Sixties urban R&B and soul with dashes of blues and nods to Lee Hazlewood, Royant is a Gallic cousin to Richard Hawley. Unsurprisingly, his first Christmas album is a knowing affair.

Scooping up tracks from Royant’s seasonal singles and marrying them to newly recorded cuts, Wishing You a Merry Christmas is cool, hip and opens with a swinging cover of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” drawn from Phil Spector’s 1963 A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records album. After this, the self-composed (“C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!” sets the tone for a ten-tracker which swims in less-obvious waters, even when a song is over familiar.

Royant’s take on John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” sticks to the template vocally but otherwise injects a gentle dose of Sigur Rós' textural blur. Eels’ “Everything’s Gonna Be Cool This Christmas” is rendered straightforwardly, but Wham’s “Last Christmas” is given a Roy Orbison-esque makeover. The album ends with a fine, moody, Chris Isaak-indebted run through U2’s “New Year’s Day”.

Tastefulness is a rare commodity with Christmas albums, but Wishing You a Merry Christmas has it in spades. As a similarly classy but new contribution to an easily maligned genre, file it alongside Paul Revere & the Raiders’ bizarre A Christmas Present...and Past, Psychic TV’s Pagan Day, Etiquette Records’ Merry Christmas album, Les Disques Du Crépuscule’s Chantons Noël - Ghosts of Christmas Past and the Ze label’s A Christmas Record.

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Overleaf: watch the video for “(C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!” from Gaspard Royant’s Wishing You a Merry Christmas

Theatreland is currently awash with pantomimes and rehashes of A Christmas Carol, so all credit to this ambitious new production, an adaptation of the 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights. Long before Narnia, poet laureate John Masefield was concocting tales of children dispatched to mysterious country houses for safekeeping but encountering deep magic, time travelling and talking anim