Regardless of how increasingly famous they became—and how overburdened—the Beatles dutifully recorded a Christmas message each year from 1963-69. Distributed to fan club members via flimsy flexi-discs, these seasons-greetings audio missives were always festive and good-naturedly silly but taken seriously by the band: the affection that they had for those who put them where they were shines through in each of the seven volumes. The Christmas recordings have never been officially released before, and Capitol has done them justice, releasing the series on differently colored 7-inch vinyl singles, housed tidily in a box that also includes a 16-page booklet reproducing the fan club newsletters that accompanied each record. Ranging in length from just over four minutes to just under eight, the recordings reflect the band’s growth as artists and masters of the studio. The first, from 1963, mainly features the foursome chatting informally about the year just passed and thanking the fans, while the 1967 edition—coming as it does post-Pepper—dispenses with the small talk and delves head(s) first into the studio experimentalism then occupying the Beatles’ brains. “Christmas Time (Is Here Again),” the theme of that year’s recording, is chopped up into bits sandwiched between snippets of psychedelia and spoken word, playing off of then-current TV and radio programs. That the group had the run of the studio—encouraged wholeheartedly by their open-minded producer George Martin—is apparent by this point, so it’s no surprise that the ’68 gift sounds at times as if it was done the same day as “Revolution 9.” On the final fan club release, the way-out-there 1969 piece, another voice makes its way in, that of Yoko Ono. The seventh Christmas record is as different from the 1963-64 ones as “She Loves You” was from Abbey Road. You can tell in retrospect why it was their last.