"I've known these songs, these carols all my life, I've sung them since I was little," says the songwriter and singer of The Holly And The Ivy, Silent Night, The First Noel and other, less-widely-known songs such as Il Est Ne Le Divin Enfant, and Lullay Lullay. " They're just in me. They're a huge part of my life. So it's not an arbitrary selection. Those relationships with those pieces of music were there intrinsically before I approached the recording."

Aye, well she would say that, wouldn't she...? This is me being cynical so that you don't have to. I'd wager that, what, ten years ago, neither AL nor any other pop celeb dishing out a Festive Favourites selection would have felt the need to justify it in these earnest terms. That they do nowadays shows, I think, how the once unfashionable folkie notion of rootedness and connection has now become a cultural commonplace. Our work is done!