Luis Miguel - Navidades Luis Miguel

Luis Miguel is the biggest Latin pop star of the last forty years, and in 2006 he did what almost every great crooner eventually does: he made a Christmas record. Navidades was the result, and it has quietly become a fixture of the season across Latin America and the Spanish-speaking United States.

The approach is exactly what you would want from him. Big-band arrangements, full orchestration, and that enormous, unhurried voice working through carols in Spanish alongside a few English-language standards. He had already spent a decade proving on the Romances albums that he could take songs everyone knows and make them feel like his own, and the same instinct carries the holiday material here.

Twenty years on it remains one of the few modern Spanish-language Christmas albums that people actually return to every December rather than tolerate.