Jona Lewie, The Sound Of Music, party hats, drunk relations telling dirty jokes, yes, as the playfully sceptical That'll Be Christmas puts it, complete with George Harrison homage slide solo, it's the season of faith, hope and gluttony.

As you might expect from one of the country's most gifted, articulate. literate and intelligent songwriters, Gilmore's debut contribution to the seasonal album genre is a cut above the usual. For a start there's not a traditional carol, faithful, reworked or otherwise, in sight. Rather the album opens with Sol Invictus, a self-penned invocation to the pagan sun god (okay, there are echoes of O Come Emmanuel to the melody) summoned by the Romans every December 25, delivered unaccompanied by Gilmore and the Sense Of Sound Choir, its 'rise up, rise up chorus' is surely destined to be heard as dawn rises over Stonehenge on the Solstice.

Spiritual and cynical, joyful and melancholic in equal measure, the songs reflect on the ancient and modern, teasing over the season's contradictions while celebrating its heartfelt institutions.

Dating back to 2004, there's no mistaking the personal input on a track called Thea Gilmore's Windwinter Toast, a gently tumbling acoustic 'hymn to you all' that reflects on 'a crazy year' and 'all the damage done" with a vow to "make next year a better one". With voices swelling in the background, you could picture her singing this from the choir stalls of a small country church.

A funky bass driven groove and prowling electric fiddle taking up the baton from a strummed guitar medieval mood intro, Cold Coming, inspired by T S Eliot's iconic Journey Of The Magi, gives rise to the album's title and offers both a religious and, in the line about 'the ringing of the till', a secular commercialised take on the nativity.

There are three other Gilmore originals here, all sterling additions to her already glittering catalogue. The tumbling wistful, Baez-like Drunken Angel, a reflection, as she says in her song notes, on "more childish times", trying to make sense of an increasingly complicated life and the realisation that sometimes you simply have to go with your heart, it features a soaring chorus that makes the hairs on the back of your neck tingle.

Acoustic guitar building to embrace strings and piano, the bending notes tinged with frosty rime and cold breath on winter breeze, December In New York is a magical folk-hewn snapshot that was actually written nine years ago, before she'd ever been there. And, finally, preceded by Book Of Christmas, a spoken extract about the shifting nature of the season from Louis MacNiece's 1938 poem Autumn Journal, tinged with hints of Appalachia, plucked out on melodica and featuring recorder solo, Old December is a road song about coming home after 'long months of the wheel and the microphone", her celebration of hope, community and love.

There's also two obscure but perfectly appropriate non originals. Previously covered by Nilsson and Galaxie 500, Listen, The Snow Is Falling is a dreamily beautiful Yoko Ono song, full of childlike wonder, and, with chiming bells in the background, Gilmore sings it in a hushed whisper faithful to the originally version as the B side to Happy Xmas (War Is Over).

The second is a different beast altogether. First heard by producer and partner Nigel Stonier 15 years earlier, The St Stephen's Day Murders was co-written by Elvis Costello and Paddy Moloney and only available on The Chieftains' live album The Bells of Dublin Christmas.

A rowdy black humoured celebration of the drunken chaos of Christmas family gatherings, it's a deliberate musical pastiche of Fairytale of New York, suitably revived now with special guest Mark Radcliffe playing Shane to Thea's Kirsty and Stonier and violinist Fluff giving it the full Celtic banjos and whistles. If I may just paraphrase a line from Old December, "whoever you praise, raise a glass to Thea's days, and sing sing."