Firestone and Goodyear Christmas Albums: Every Volume, Who's on Them and What They're Worth (2026)

If you have just carried a box of tire-company Christmas LPs out of a relative's basement, here is the honest answer before the detail: these are among the most widely distributed records ever pressed in America, and that is precisely why they are worth very little. Antique Trader's Tim Neely, writing on 16 December 2024, puts it plainly — the enormous print runs mean these albums were "cheap in the 1960s" and "remain common and cheap today." Modern Tire Dealer made the same observation back on 1 December 2003, noting that most Goodyear and Firestone holiday LPs "collect dust in attics and thrift-store record bins." Twenty years later nothing has changed.

That is not the whole story, though, and the exceptions are specific rather than vague. Neely names the 1967 Firestone mono pressing as somewhat harder to find than its stereo counterpart; the 1988 Firestone two-LP anniversary set as much harder to find than any of the original seven; and Goodyear's last two albums, after the series moved from Columbia Special Products to RCA in 1975, as relatively hard to find. One more title is collected for its content rather than its scarcity: Goodyear's 1972 Christmas Is, which carries the first album appearance of the Carpenters' "Merry Christmas Darling." Everything else in that box is a decoration, a listening copy, or a dollar bin record — and there is no shame in any of those three.

The sponsored Christmas LP was one of the smartest retail promotions of the postwar era. A tire dealership is a destination nobody visits for pleasure, so Goodyear and Firestone gave people a reason to walk in during the one month of the year when every household is shopping: a full-length orchestral and vocal Christmas album, with major-label artists on it, for about a dollar — sometimes with a purchase, sometimes simply for stopping by. The records were not label releases in the ordinary sense. They were custom pressings, commissioned through the special-products divisions that Columbia, RCA and Capitol ran for exactly this kind of corporate client, with an advertising agency handling the artistic side. Firestone's seven volumes were produced by the jingle house Forrell & Thomas.

The economics worked immediately. Deep Roots Magazine (18 December 2023) reports that Goodyear's first album, in 1961, was pressed in 900,000 copies, stocked nationwide and priced at $1 — and Antique Trader notes it "was completely sold out by December 1," which prompted bigger runs every year after. By 24 December 1966, Billboard was reporting that the Goodyear albums "produced annually for the past six years" had sold approximately fifteen million copies at a dollar each. Those are Beatles-scale numbers for a record you could not buy in a record store, and they explain the market today better than any price guide can. Supply this deep never becomes scarce.

The Firestone Christmas record series ran to seven volumes, one a year from 1962 to 1968, sold under titles like Favorite Christmas Carols from the Voice of Firestone and Your Christmas Favorites — the branding varies slightly from sleeve to sleeve, which is one reason people assume there are more volumes than there are. The artist rosters are genuinely impressive: Risë Stevens and Brian Sullivan with the Firestone Orchestra and Chorus under John Lesko on Volume 1 (1962); Stevens and Sullivan again with the Columbus Boychoir in 1963; Gordon MacRae, Martha Wright, Franco Corelli and Roberta Peters in 1964; Julie Andrews, Vic Damone, Dorothy Kirsten, James McCracken and the Young Americans under Irwin Kostal in 1965; Julie Andrews with André Previn in 1966; and Jack Jones, Roberta Peters and the Vienna Choir Boys in 1967. The table below is built from the Discogs series page for Firestone Presents Your Christmas Favorites (series 1576090), checked 12 October 2026.

Read that table from the right-hand columns first. The owner counts are the single most useful number on this page: when several thousand Discogs users already log owning a given volume, you are not holding a rarity, you are holding a record that half the collectors who want one already have. Note also the number of distinct LP versions per volume — multiple pressings of the same album are another supply signal. The one row worth a second look is 1967, because of the mono/stereo split Antique Trader flags, and the 1966 Julie Andrews/Previn volume, which RCA reissued commercially in 1967 as A Christmas Treasure and which Wikipedia describes as one of the largest sellers among these custom recordings. If you are new to sorting pressing variations, our guide to identifying rare vinyl pressings covers the same logic applied to mainstream releases.

Goodyear started first and ran far longer. The Great Songs of Christmas began in 1961 with a line-up that reads like a Columbia Records sampler — Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Percy Faith, André Kostelanetz and Norman Luboff — and continued with a new album every year. Nine numbered volumes appeared from 1961 to 1969, followed by Best of the Great Songs of Christmas as the tenth in 1970. These were Columbia Special Products releases; The Second Disc (10 October 2019) lists the catalogue numbers for the first eight as XTV 69406 (1961), XTV 86101 (1962), CSP 117 (1963), CSP 155 S (1964), CSP 238 S (1965), CSS 388 (1966), CSS 547 (1967) and CSS 888 (1968). The table below comes from the Discogs series page for The Great Songs Of Christmas (series 937352), checked 12 October 2026.

Two rows reward attention. Album Seven (1967) is the strongest single line-up of the whole run — Tony Bennett, George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra, Sally Ann Howes, Jerry Vale, John Davidson, Robert Goulet, the New Christy Minstrels and Barbra Streisand on one $1 record — and Album Nine (1969) carried two new Petula Clark recordings, which is the kind of detail that creates demand from single-artist collectors rather than Christmas collectors. People searching for Goodyear Christmas albums value by year are usually hoping the table is also a price list; it is not, and it cannot be, because no published source assigns a dollar figure to individual volumes. What the table does give you is identification: which volume you hold, which pressing it is, and how many other people own one. For the valuation side, work from our vinyl record value guide and from completed sales, not from asking prices.

The series did not stop at the numbered volumes, which is where most online lists fall apart. Goodyear offered a new album every year from 1961 through 1977. After the 1970 Best of, each release carried a different name: Joyous Songs of Christmas (1971), Christmas Is (1972), Many Moods of Christmas (1973), Carols and Candlelight (1974), Henry Mancini Selects Great Songs of Christmas (1975), Mancini Moods at Christmastime (1976) and Great Songs of Christmas with Perry Como and Eugene Ormandy (1977). Antique Trader notes the series moved from Columbia to RCA in 1975 and that the last two LPs are relatively hard to find — a useful reminder that in sponsored series, the end of a run is often scarcer than the beginning.

Firestone's post-1968 Christmas records are the trickiest items on this whole subject, because they are not obviously Firestone records at all. The company's 1970s holiday albums came out on Capitol — Christmas America (1973) and its Album Two (1974), The Wonderful World of Christmas (1975) and its Album Two (1976) — and the only thing distinguishing the Firestone promotional copies from ordinary Capitol stock is a red "Seasons Greetings Firestone" sticker applied to the shrink-wrap. No sticker, no shrink, no Firestone connection. If you are buying one of these as a Firestone item, buy it sealed or do not buy it at all. Separately, the single rarest Firestone Christmas release is the 1988 two-LP Your Favorite Songs of Christmas: 20th Anniversary Collectors Album, which Antique Trader describes as much harder to find than the original seven.

Once Goodyear proved the format, every retailer with a counter and a Christmas season tried it. If your estate-sale box contains tire-company LPs, it very likely contains hardware-store and department-store ones too, and the same rules apply: enormous distribution, negligible value, with scarcity concentrated at the tail end of each run.

The True Value row is the one to internalise, because it is the clearest illustration of how sponsored-series scarcity actually works. The series ran for four decades, which means the 1960s and 1970s volumes were pressed in vinyl-era quantities while the late-1980s volumes were caught in the switch to CD — hence Antique Trader flagging Volume 24 (1989) as scarce on vinyl and Volume 25 (1990) as rare. The last vinyl pressings in a long series are often the sleepers. For context on which holiday records genuinely command money, see our round-up of Christmas vinyl records worth money.

With prices this compressed, the usual drivers of record value barely register — but they are not zero, and knowing them tells you which three or four discs to pull out of the box. In rough order of how much they matter for this specific category:

1. Condition of the sleeve, not the disc. These albums lived in attics and under Christmas trees. Ring wear, split seams and water staining are near-universal, so a genuinely clean, flat, bright sleeve is the scarce part. Grade honestly using standard vinyl grading standards — Goldmine's VG/VG+/NM scale is what buyers expect to see quoted.
2. Mono versus stereo. Mono LPs were being phased out across the industry in the late 1960s, so late mono runs are the smaller population — the reason Antique Trader singles out the 1967 Firestone mono.
3. Content that crosses over to another collecting base. Goodyear's 1972 Christmas Is is collected by Carpenters completists for "Merry Christmas Darling"; the 1969 volume by Petula Clark collectors. That demand is not about Christmas at all.
4. Late-run volumes. Goodyear 1976 and 1977; Firestone's 1988 set; True Value Volumes 24 and 25.
5. Still sealed. For the 1970s Firestone Capitol titles this is effectively mandatory, since the red shrink-wrap sticker is the only proof of what you have.

One identification tip that costs nothing: Fonts in Use (25 December 2024), citing Discogs, notes that Firestone volumes 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 were manufactured by RCA's custom records division while volumes 4 and 6 came from Capitol. Checking the manufacturing credit in the dead wax and on the label is a fast way to confirm you have an original rather than a later reissue sleeve with a swapped disc inside. Tools like VinylAI let you scan the barcode or snap the label to pull up the exact Discogs release and pressing details before you decide what is worth listing.

Here is a practical triage for a crate of sponsored Christmas LPs. First, pull every record with a tire company, hardware chain or department-store name on it into one stack — that stack is, as a rule of thumb, a dollar-or-two-each stack at a garage sale or a bulk lot on a local marketplace, and no published source gives a higher figure for any of the seven Firestone volumes or the main Goodyear volumes. Second, pull the four named exceptions: Firestone 1988 anniversary set, Firestone 1967 mono, Goodyear 1976 and 1977, plus any still-sealed 1970s Capitol title with the red Firestone sticker intact. Third — and this is where the real money usually hides — look at what else is in the box, because households that bought dollar Christmas records also bought Sinatra, Elvis, Mantovani and, occasionally, something from the most valuable vinyl records end of the market.

Should you sell the common ones individually? Usually not. Shipping a single LP in the US costs more than the record is worth, and listing time is a real cost. Sell them as a lot of ten or twenty with honest photographs of the sleeves, or keep them — they are genuinely enjoyable December listening, with real orchestras and real singers, and they belong on the "play it, don't vault it" side of any collection. Our guide to the best Christmas albums on vinyl is a good companion if you want to build a holiday shelf, and if the whole crate landed on you at once, what to do with an inherited record collection and our notes on how to sell vinyl records will save you a weekend of guesswork.