The holidays can be a time of year when unfortunate traditions run high. Many families like mine are all too eager to break out boxes of Christmas decorations, movies, and Bing Crosby CDs that spend 11 months of the year in our garage collecting dust.

And with the holidays comes the same crop of Christmas songs we’ve all been subject to since birth: the so-called “Jingle Bell Rock,” the creepy “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and the unavoidable “Santa Baby.”

Christmas music is one of those things that it is difficult to openly refute. It’s something so universally accepted and unchallenged, you might have an easier time convincing someone that The Beatles were overrated.

The problem is simply that we’ve all heard it for so long and associated it with mugs of hot chocolate and our Grandma’s cookies that it doesn’t occur to us to stop and realize:  This is some really uninspired and commercial garbage.

There are, of course, some excellent exceptions to the endless supply of seasonal musical pandering.

For those looking to enjoy the holiday spirit without being subject to ten different renditions of Wham’s “Last Christmas” on the holiday Pandora station, indie musician Sufjan Stevens offers two massive holiday-themed albums chalk-full of witty, original and beautifully arranged masterpieces.

Stevens recorded a series of five Christmas mixtapes in the early 2000s that were compiled and released as a proper album, “Songs for Christmas,” in 2006. The album, which includes 42 holiday-inspired tracks, ranges from exquisite acoustic and folk transcriptions of well-known hymns, to uniquely interpreted versions of holiday classics. Stevens peppers the album with hilariously-relatable originals that explore the absurdity of the holidays, notably singing carols to your mom and your finals graded on a curve in “It’s Christmas! Let’s Be Glad!”

“Silver and Gold” is Stevens’ second and even longer holiday repertoire. Released in 2012, “Silver and Gold” puts Stevens in an utterly new element, reimagining 58 Christmas tunes in a bizarre, avant-garde style. The delicate style of “Songs for Christmas” shines through in the classic, “Angels We Have Heard on High,” while “Do You Hear What I Hear?” becomes a nearly unrecognizable, nine-minute electronic phenomenon. As aptly described by one iTunes reviewer, “Silver and Gold” is “Kinda like spending Christmas Day at your weird cousins’ house.”

In the mid of a season marred by poorly-lyricized and unimaginative holiday favorites, Stevens’ contributions are a breath of fresh air that appeal to an enormous number of genres, tongue firmly in cheek.