“Every recording artist has to make a Christmas record,” Gary Chapman once said. “It’s the law.”
Whether Third Day would have ever been prosecuted for failure to comply is now a moot point. Christmas Offerings (Essential), the third installment of the Atlanta-based band’s wildly popular “Offerings” series, more than satisfies the requirement. But while all the members confess to being huge fans of the music of the season, according to front man Mac Powell, a Christmas album was not even on their radar until recently.
“We never put a lot of thought into doing a Christmas album,” he explains. “In the first place, we’re a rock band. We didn’t know what kind of Christmas record we could make or whether it would be any good. In the second place, it wasn’t by any means a record we had to do. It was certainly not a record that helps us contractually, so when you look at it from a business perspective it probably is not even a wise thing to do. But over the past couple of years we’ve had so many friends and fans ask us to do it, and since we like to provide our fans with what they want, we said, ‘OK, let’s take a shot at it.’”
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