It's all in the 'ear of the beholder'; what one person loves, another thinks is crap.

I remember a discussion from several years ago about The Gift by Stephanie Davis. We got the full range of opinions about it. Some loved it, some hated the sentimentality.

Personally, I probably won't bother to listen as I don't particularly care all that much for her music anyway. *** OK, I figured that I best listen to the music from the links provided by Joe before consigning it to the rubbish heap.

I found the track samples inoffensive at worst and I quite liked some of them well enough to listen attentively if I heard them on the radio. Personal Favorites -- Universal Child , her own contribution, and See Amid The Winter's Snow .

Buy it? No. Not my style, but I imagine it will sell well. We'll see.

Like Joe, I really like Christmas music, and have a fairly large collection. My all time favorite Christmas album is We Three Kings by the Roches. Richard is free to dislike it intensely if he so chooses. (Shockingly, I see it is apparently Out of Print now, and is priced at anywhere from $30-$150!!! at Amazon. I paid less than $10 some years ago.)

Quote from Annie found at Amazon, where the majority of the reviewers gave it 4 or 5 stars, though some gave it one.

"All the income that I earn from Universal Child will be paid to the Annie Lennox Foundation." The Annie Lennox Foundation, the stars own charity, raises money for charitable projects supporting and educating women and children in Africa with HIV/AIDS.

"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."