Tchaikovsky excerpted eight numbers from his ballet "The Nutcracker" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T… to form "The Nutcracker Suite", which might've been one of the first composer-selected greatest hits collections. These have all become such beloved elements of the classic Christmas music canon that it's amazing to think that, although it premiered in 1892, the music wasn't terribly popular until half a century later. Based on an 1816 short story by oddball German author E.T.A. Hoffmann en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E… , it didn't really achieve traction until Walt Disney used some of the music in "Fantasia" in 1940, and after Ballanchine's staging of it at the New York Ballet in 1954.

My parents took me to see it performed by the Pennsylvania Ballet at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, and it really stuck with me en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P… . That's one of the reasons why every Christmas Day, I listen to the full 90-minute score. There's a particularly good Deutsche Grammophon version recorded in 2013 by the Los Angeles Symphony (recorded at the Walt Disney Theatre, no less), which is up on YouTube in its entirety (if you don't mind an occasional ad) youtu.be/NRWelhnz-Y8 . Otherwise it's on Spotify open.spotify.com/album/… .

As I get older, I find myself listening an increasing amount of music by Russian composers for some reason.

P.S. Here's my mostly mid-20th century popular music Spotify Christmas playlist open.spotify.com/playli… .