Holly Cole will not be haunted by Christmas ghosts this year.

The husky-voiced cabaret singer who's fronting the National Arts Centre Orchestra in a funky Christmas carolling tonight, has wanted to record her most-loved Christmas carols for a long time.

But the prospect of being haunted by a flawed Christmas record scared her about as much as the Christmas spirits spooked Scrooge.

Until last year, that is, if you don't count her first release, 1989's The Christmas Blues, she recalls, "which is a bizarre thing to do. People generally don't buy Christmas albums by artists they've never heard of."

But the darling of Toronto's hip cocktail scene and one of Canada's chief jazz exports has recorded a Christmas record, Baby It's Cold Outside that, egad, you can listen to all year. Produced by Cole with longtime collaborators pianist Aaron Davis and bass-player David Piltch, the album was painstakingly assembled, taking almost a full year to record.

Last minute

"So many artists spend all this time, money and effort on their regular albums and leave their Christmas album to the last moment," says Cole. "I worked harder on this album more than any other album I've done. Sure seasonal records have a very finite shelf life. But then it reappears next year and the next, and the next. They come back to haunt you every year and then disappear Dec. 25. Can you imagine if Bing Crosby has just slapped Merry Christmas together?"

A holiday album seems an unlikely place for Cole to break new musical ground, but that's just what she did.

"When you do as many Christmas concerts as I do, every year, I want to inject new material, so I've found some pretty rare material. One of my favourite tunes on the record is the Merle Haggard tune If We Make It Through December. It embodies all the good things in country music, it's direct, unapologetic and represents an aspect of Christmas that many people experience but few want to talk about: Loneliness."

But the carol that's been giving her the most trouble is the purrfectly sexy Eartha Kitt hit Santa Baby. Cole laughs. "It takes a lot for me to make Santa sexy." (More On: Holly Cole)