Elvis' Christmas Album on Vinyl: 1957 Original vs 1970 Camden, and What Yours Is Worth (2026)

Most people searching for the Elvis Christmas album vinyl 1970 value are holding the same record: the RCA Camden CAL-2428 budget reissue, released in November 1970. You can confirm it in five seconds — flip the jacket over and count the songs. If there are ten, and the back cover or label says Camden, that is the 1970 edition. The 1957 original has twelve songs, including four gospel titles ("Peace in the Valley", "I Believe", "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and "It Is No Secret") that RCA dropped from the Camden to make room for "If Every Day Was Like Christmas" and "Mama Liked the Roses".

The honest verdict on that record: it is worth a few dollars to a few tens of dollars. Rather Rare Records' guide, updated in 2025, puts near-mint original 1970 Camden copies at $10-20 and the 1975 Pickwick reissue at $5-10. Goldmine's price guide lists a higher suggested figure of $200 for a 1970 Camden with a blue label on non-flexible vinyl, and the gap between those two numbers is the single most important thing to understand on this page. A price-guide figure describes a flawless, first-run copy with a clean jacket; it is a suggestion, not a sale. A ring-worn, sleeve-split, surface-noisy copy of a record pressed in the millions is a different object entirely, and it trades accordingly.

Elvis' Christmas Album exists as two distinct albums under one title: the twelve-song 1957 record and the ten-song 1970 Camden rework. Discogs catalogues 287 versions of the 1957 album (master 198519) and 167 versions of the 1970 Camden album (master 107538), checked 12 October 2026 — a scale that tells you immediately why most copies are common. The table below is built from both Discogs masters and is for identification only: year, country, label and catalogue number, format and runout, so you can match the label in your hand rather than guess from a blurry photo.

Read the table from the catalogue number first. LOC-1035 rows are the 1957 deluxe gatefold edition — the 1957 Indianapolis, Rockaway and Hollywood pressings sit right next to the Camden and Pickwick rows, so you can see how close the catalogue numbers look and how different the records are. LPM-1951 rows are the late-1950s standard-cover reissue with the same twelve songs. CAL-2428 is the 1970 Camden and CAS-2428 is the 1975 Pickwick. If your row is one of the last two, stop reading the valuation sections hopefully and read the selling section practically. Barcode-era copies — anything with a scannable UPC — are later repackages, and tools like VinylAI can match them against the full pressing list from a phone camera in a few seconds.

Released on 15 October 1957 as what RCA Victor called "a deluxe limited edition", LOC-1035 came in a red gatefold cover with a booklet of photographs bound into the sleeve. elvisrecords.com's LOC-1035 guide describes a black label with silver print and a 12-page booklet, and notes that the binding lettering on the spine can be gold or silver. Wikipedia's entry states plainly that "original copies with the gold sticker intact on the shrink wrap have proven to be among the most valuable of Presley's albums" — that sticker, applied over the shrink, is the single most expensive square inch of cardboard and plastic in Elvis collecting.

Plant identification comes from the matrix numbers etched in the runout. Per elvisrecords.com, the 1957 pressings are told apart by suffix: Indianapolis as H2PP-6526-1S, Rockaway as -3S/-4S, and Hollywood as -5S. Tilt the dead wax under a bright lamp and read it before you believe any seller's description. Two cautions worth more than any price: the authenticity of loose gold stickers is disputed — a sticker that is not adhered to intact factory shrink proves nothing — and reproduction booklets and re-shrunk jackets circulate. Heritage Auctions has recorded sales of a sealed LOC-1035 (13 November 2022) and of a first pressing graded EX/NM (5 December 2024); the realised prices sit behind a sign-in, so we do not quote them, but the existence of those lots tells you the real market for authenticated originals runs through specialist auction houses. If you are learning the craft, our primer on how to identify rare vinyl pressings covers matrix reading in detail.

Once the deluxe gatefold run was done, RCA reissued the album as LPM-1951 with a regular single-pocket cover and the same twelve songs. Dating it is genuinely messy: Wikipedia gives October 1959 in one section and calls it "the 1958 reissue" in another, while Goldmine's price guide lists an LPM 1951 from 1958. The honest answer is 1958 or 1959 — and if a seller insists on one year with total confidence, ask what they are reading it from.

What matters for value is the label, not the year on the sleeve. Goldmine's guide separates three LPM-1951 variants by label detail and era, and the suggested values fall off a cliff as you move later: the earliest version with "Long Play" at the bottom of the label is listed at $500 near-mint, a 1963 version at $350, and a 1964 version at $80. Those are guide suggestions for clean copies, not auction results. The lesson generalises to almost every classic rock title: within a single catalogue number, the label design carries most of the money. This is the core skill behind telling an original pressing from a reissue, and it is why two records that look identical in a photo can differ in value by a factor of six.

In November 1970 RCA moved the album to its budget imprint, Camden, as CAL-2428. The four gospel songs originally lifted from the Peace in the Valley EP came off, "If Every Day Was Like Christmas" and "Mama Liked the Roses" went on, and the result was a ten-track record sold at a price point designed for supermarkets and drugstore racks. In 1975 Pickwick reissued that same Camden programme with another cover design, catalogued CAS-2428 per Rather Rare Records. Between them, those two budget editions put Elvis under more American Christmas trees than any other record.

The numbers explain everything about the value question. Wikipedia reports the album has shipped at least 17 million copies in the US, was the first Presley title certified Diamond, and is the best-selling Christmas album of all time in the US; its list of best-selling US Christmas albums breaks the 17 million down as roughly 3 million of the 1957 release, 10 million of the Camden/Pickwick versions and 4 million of a later repackage. Ten million copies of one ten-song budget LP is not a rarity: it is wallpaper. Collectors' own logs say the same: on Discogs, 9,699 members record owning the US 1970 Camden pressing and 7,735 the US 1975 Pickwick, against 937, 738 and 463 for the Hollywood, Indianapolis and Rockaway pressings of the 1957 LOC-1035 (checked 12 October 2026). Scarcity drives price far more than fame does, which is the thread running through our round-up of the most valuable vinyl records and our wider look at Christmas vinyl records worth money. As a footnote to how big this record became: Irving Berlin thought Presley's "White Christmas" a "profane parody" and campaigned to have it banned from radio.

Here is where almost every page gets it wrong. Wikipedia notes that limited red-vinyl copies, and covers with gold print down the spine, add to the value of the 1957 album — it gives no prices. The headline numbers come from two separate places and neither is a clean, documented auction result.

• $30,000 was an asking price. CNBC (Colleen Kane, 29 January 2013) ran a piece headlined "For Sale: Red Elvis Christmas Album Offered for $30,000". An RCA engineer at the New Jersey plant had pressed a copy on red vinyl as a souvenir; owner Rev. Steven Banas listed it on eBay with a buy-it-now price of nearly $30,000, supported by a signed affidavit and the engineer's 1957 W-2s. Dealer John Tefteller told CNBC he would consider paying $10,000 and that Banas had paid $15,000. Rather Rare Records says there is no evidence that copy ever sold.
• $18,000 has no documented venue. Goldmine (Frank Daniels, 24 December 2019) writes that the red-vinyl copy made at RCA's Rockaway plant in 1957 "sold for $18,000", without a date or an auction house. An AudioKarma thread from November 2013 traces the same figure to a 2012 WCBS-FM list phrased as "can be worth up to $18,000" — and nobody in that thread documents a sale.
• Nobody agrees how many exist. One account describes a single souvenir pressing; Tefteller told CNBC he knew of one or two other copies. Treat any seller who states a firm number as unsourced.

This is the clearest asking-price-is-not-a-sale lesson in record collecting, attached to the most-repeated figure in it. An eBay buy-it-now price tells you what one owner hoped for; a completed, verified auction tells you what a buyer paid. When you see a four- or five-figure number quoted for any record, ask which of those two it is — the same discipline applies to the headline prices in our top 100 most valuable vinyl records rankings.

A large share of "my Elvis Christmas album" questions are actually about a second record. Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas is a separate album of new recordings, released on 20 October 1971 on RCA Victor and produced by Felton Jarvis. It was certified 3x Platinum by the RIAA in 1999. It shares a season and an artist with the 1957 album and nothing else — different sessions, different songs, different sleeve.

Because it is a 1971 album that stayed in print and kept selling, used copies are common; as a rule it is a record to play, not a find. The identification shortcut is the cover and the tracklist — if you see "O Come, All Ye Faithful" and "The First Noel", you have the 1971 album, not the 1957 one. Do not let a seller blur the two, and be wary of listings that quote the red-vinyl headline figures next to a photo of the 1971 sleeve. For the rest of the catalogue — the Sun-era singles, the mono/stereo RCA LPs, the FTD-era pressings — see our wider Elvis Presley vinyl collecting guide, which handles the albums outside the Christmas titles.

Below are published guide figures with their dates and sources. These are suggested values for near-mint copies, not sales records, and every one of them assumes a clean jacket and a quiet record.

Put the last three rows side by side and the whole market becomes legible. Goldmine's $200 Camden figure is a ceiling for a pristine, first-run blue-label copy; Rather Rare Records' $10-20 is what ordinary near-mint copies of a ten-million-seller actually command. Neither source is wrong — they are describing different objects. Also note the 2015 sale of a stickered LOC-1035 at $499 against Goldmine's four-figure suggestion: that single data point is the most useful line in the table, because it is a real transaction.

To sell: grade honestly against recognised vinyl grading standards, photograph the spine lettering, the gatefold interior, the label and the runout etching, and transcribe the matrix number into the listing. If your copy is a factory-sealed 1957 original, stop and get it authenticated before anything else — the premium and the forgery risk both live there, as covered in our guide to sealed vinyl record values. For Camden and Pickwick copies, bundling several Christmas LPs into one lot usually nets more than listing each alone once shipping is priced in; our walkthrough on how to sell vinyl records covers channel choice and fees. And if the answer turns out to be "twelve dollars", keep it — this is still the best-selling Christmas album in American history, and a fine first record for anyone learning how to start a vinyl collection.