The Dean Martin Christmas Album on Vinyl: Every Pressing and What It's Worth (2026)

If you want to play the record, buy the modern reissue. Legacy put the album back on vinyl on 2 October 2020 as a red pressing — Acoustic Sounds lists it as 150-gram red vinyl — and it is quiet, available new, and spares you the surface noise that fifty-nine Christmases of living-room play leaves on a 1966 copy. If you want the dean martin christmas album original, that means a 1966 Reprise pressing: mono R 6222 or stereo RS 6222, both dated 11 October 1966 on the album's Discogs master.

As for value, here is the honest answer the shop listings will not give you: an ordinary, played 1966 copy is worth roughly what any common 1960s easy-listening LP in the same condition is worth — bin material, not glass-case material. There is no published editorial price figure for this title, and anybody quoting you a dramatic number is quoting an asking price, not a sale. The premium exists only at the top of the condition scale: a still-sealed copy, or a near-mint mono with a clean, unsplit sleeve. A scratched copy with a seam-split jacket is worth close to nothing, however famous the singer is.

Most confusion about the dean martin christmas vinyl market comes from the fact that there are two genuine Dean Martin Christmas albums and a pile of later compilations wearing similar artwork. The Second Disc (11 November 2011) is clear on the point: Martin recorded only two Christmas albums in his career. Everything else is a repackage, often with tracks pulled from both.

The track people search for most, "Baby, It's Cold Outside", is on the earlier one — A Winter Romance, issued by Capitol on 16 November 1959. It is not on the 1966 Reprise album. If you buy a 1966 copy expecting that duet, you will be disappointed ten tracks later.

The row that matters for collectors is the second one. Only the Reprise 1966 album carries catalogue numbers R 6222 and RS 6222, and only that album was certified Gold by the RIAA on 27 November 1968. If a seller advertises a "1966 original" but the sleeve says Christmas with Dino or My Kind of Christmas, you are looking at a twenty-first-century compilation.

Below are the vinyl editions on the album's Discogs master, one row per year, country and catalogue number, checked on 12 October 2026 — year, country, label, catalogue number, format and runout detail where it exists. It is an identification table, not a price list: use it to work out which record is in your hands before you worry about what it is worth.

Read the table from the catalogue prefix inwards. A plain R prefix means mono, RS means stereo, and the country column is what separates a US first pressing from a Canadian, UK or German edition that looks almost identical on the shelf. If your copy's number is not 6222 at all, you are holding a reissue or a compilation. When you are comparing a sleeve in a shop against the table on your phone, tools like VinylAI can scan the barcode on modern reissues or let you search the title and pull the edition list up in seconds — handy in a crowded December record fair where the seller insists every copy is "the first". For the broader method behind this kind of detective work, see our walkthrough on how to identify a rare pressing and our guide to working out which country pressed your record.

The dean martin christmas album 1966 reprise release arrived in the last years in which American labels bothered with two separate configurations. Reprise used the prefix R for mono and RS for stereo, so R 6222 and RS 6222 are the same ten songs cut from different mixes. Discogs dates both to 11 October 1966; Wikipedia records the sessions as September 1966 and a chart peak of No. 18 on the Billboard 200. The credits are the same on both: Jimmy Bowen producing, Bill Justis and Ernie Freeman arranging and conducting, art direction by Ed Thrasher.

Collectors usually ask which is scarcer. The measurable evidence is owner counts, and on Discogs on 12 October 2026 about 1,270 users logged the US mono and about 1,580 the US stereo. Those are ownership figures, not prices, and they tell you two things: the mono is modestly less common, consistent with the industry-wide collapse of mono production as the format was phased out by 1968, and neither is rare in any meaningful sense. Collectors who chase mono mixes of mid-1960s pop — the same instinct that drives the Beatles White Album pressing hierarchy — will pay more for a clean R 6222, but the premium is a condition premium with a mono bonus, not a rarity windfall.

The dean martin christmas album vinyl travelled widely. Reprise and its licensees pressed it outside the US — Canada, the UK, Germany and France among them — and those editions keep turning up in US shops mixed in with domestic stock because the cover art is near-identical. The giveaways are the small print, not the picture: distributor credits, a rights-society logo such as GEMA on German copies or BIEM/STEMRA on other European editions, price-code stickers, and the catalogue-number suffixes that differ by territory. The table above lists the countries on the Discogs master — check yours against it rather than guessing.

Why it matters: a German or Dutch pressing from the 1970s is not a 1966 US first pressing, and a seller who labels it one is either careless or hopeful. Equally, a foreign pressing is not automatically a worse record. What it almost never is, is more valuable, because the demand for this title is overwhelmingly American and seasonal. If you are unpicking the small print on a jacket for the first time, our guide to identifying a record's country of pressing explains the rights-society logos and matrix conventions in detail, and our overview of genuinely valuable vinyl is a useful reality check on where a Gold-certified Christmas album sits in that hierarchy.

Sony acquired Dean Martin's Reprise catalogue from Universal's UMe in 2014 (The Second Disc, 26 October 2017), which is why the current reissues come from Legacy rather than Warner. Legacy returned the album to vinyl on 2 October 2020 (The Second Disc, 5 October 2020), and Acoustic Sounds lists that edition as 150-gram red vinyl. It is the sensible buy for anyone who wants the record under the tree rather than under glass: new, sealed and unplayed.

Two caveats about coloured vinyl, both worth knowing before you choose it over a clean black original. First, pigmented compounds can be marginally noisier than carbon-black vinyl, though a well-made 150-gram red pressing is usually indistinguishable in practice. Second, coloured reissues of standard catalogue titles rarely appreciate — they are produced to meet seasonal demand, not to be scarce. Our guide to coloured vinyl covers the sonic and collectability trade-offs properly. If you are building a holiday shelf rather than an investment portfolio, pair it with the picks in our roundup of the best Christmas albums on vinyl, where the 1966 Reprise set earns its place on the strength of Ernie Freeman's charts alone.

This is the question that brings most people here, so let us answer it as a rule rather than a number. Are Dean Martin vinyl records worth anything? Yes — but as music, mostly, and as modest trade stock. Martin sold enormously in his lifetime, which is exactly why his LPs are not scarce: the same commercial success that got this album certified Gold on 27 November 1968 also put millions of copies into American homes. Scarcity and fame are different variables, and conflating them is the single most common mistake new collectors make.

Where Dean Martin value does concentrate is at the edges: still-sealed stock, promotional pressings with designated promo labels, mono configurations of titles issued at the very end of the mono era, and copies with exceptional jackets — no ring wear, no seam splits, no price stickers. That is a condition story, and it is why learning to grade honestly matters more than memorising catalogue numbers. Use our vinyl grading standards before you buy or list, and read our guide to Christmas vinyl that is actually worth money to see which holiday records genuinely command premiums — and why a Gold-selling crooner LP usually is not one of them. Collectors working the same era often cross-shop the Frank Sinatra Reprise catalogue, where the same logic applies.

Demand for this record is violently seasonal, and there is hard evidence for it. BroadwayWorld reported on 13 December 2018 that on the Billboard 200 dated 15 December 2018 the album climbed from No. 102 to No. 72, while "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" entered the Hot 100 at No. 41 — Martin's first Hot 100 entry in almost fifty years, more than half a century after release. Streaming drives that, and the vinyl market follows the same calendar: as a rule, interest in a Christmas title peaks in late November and December and falls away in January.

Practical rules if you are transacting now. Buying: ask for photos of the deadwax and the actual record under light, confirm the catalogue prefix (R or RS) and country against the table above, and ignore "rare" in the listing title. Selling: list in November, grade the sleeve separately from the vinyl, and photograph seam splits honestly — buyers forgive disclosed flaws and punish hidden ones. If you are only starting out, a common, playable copy of this album is a perfect first purchase; our guide to starting a vinyl collection explains why cheap, well-pressed 1960s pop is the best training ground. And if you want context on how pressing variants create value at the top of the market, the 100 most valuable records list shows exactly what real scarcity looks like.