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Twenty years after singing the somber Ring Them Bells, he has attached them to a sleigh, painted them silver and given them a jolly jingle.Many initially greeted word of a Dylan Christmas album with disbelief, derision or suspicion, then adjusted to the news with expectations of blasphemy and Scrooge-like acerbity.
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Instead we get the Ebenezer of Dickens' denouement: open-hearted, ebullient and drunk on the spirit of the season.Dylan isn't rocking around the Christmas tree. Nor does he snow listeners by slapdashing through a few hokey carols. Avoiding his latter-day earthy blues, Dylan dresses holly-jolly tunes in bells, chimes and celesta, nestling his unmistakable croak in clouds of harmony vocals.If there's anything weirder than Dylan releasing a Christmas disc, it's that he avoided doing so during a recording career spanning 47 years and 46 releases. Snowy sets, lucrative for their perennial sales potential, have become an all-genres staple.Dylan will donate his royalties in perpetuity to three charities that aid the hungry: Feeding America, the U.K.-based Crisis and the United Nations' World Food Programme. If that isn't Christmas in the heart, what is?