Composed in the style of scripture, the Band's "Christmas Must Be Tonight" -- Robbie Robertson's ambitious Yuletide gift to his new son Sebastian during the sessions for Northern Lights-Southern Cross -- never became the seasonal favorite it should have been. Tucked away inside the 1977 odds-and-ends package Islands, the song remains a too-often-neglected gem. It's not corny, boozy or jokey enough, I suppose.

In its way, however, "Christmas Must Be Tonight" represents a canny distillation of what has made the Band such an enduring presence, from Garth Hudson's spectral colorings, to its spacious cadence, to Robertson's lyric -- offered from the perspective of a shepherd in that holy moment. "Christmas Must Be Tonight," and maybe this doomed it from the start, would take on the same kind of emotionally direct underpinning that lifted moments like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Acadian Driftwood."