No one laughed at Barbra Streisand when she did it. Neil Diamond did two of them, and folks fell over themselves praising it. No one batted an eye when two additional performers from Jewish backgrounds, Barry Manilow and Bette Midler, joined the ranks of those interpreting the American Christmas song for fun and profit.

So why do otherwise intelligent people guffaw and gasp with incredulity at the prospect of Bob Dylan singing "O' Come All Ye Faithful" and "Here Comes Santa Claus"? When word reached the mainstream press that Dylan had recorded an entire album of holiday standards called "Christmas In the Heart," the low-brow jokes began writing themselves.

Some wondered if Dylan was looking for a sly way to sing about Jesus again, even if he had to sing kitschy holiday songs starring the Baby Jesus to do it. Others wondered if he had any standing religiously speaking -- a standard never applied to Streisand, Diamond, Manilow or Midler.

I doubt that the barely suppressed snickers have anything to do with Bob Dylan's ambiguous religious status of the last 30 years. When Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman in Minnesota nearly seven decades ago, converted to fundamentalist Christianity in 1978, it was bemoaned as a shocking cultural betrayal by many of his secularly inclined fans who considered him the closest thing to a messiah they were willing to tolerate.

Dylan cut three albums in three years as a professing Christian before swinging back toward Judaism, as reflected on several cuts on "Infidels," an album he recorded while studying at the Brooklyn Lubavitch Center.

Though he refused to denounce his Christian "phase" as an ill-conceived lark, Dylan stopped hectoring his audience from the stage about Jesus and returned to performing secular songs.

"Now it's time for me to do something else," Dylan told the Los Angeles Times in a statement that didn't exactly quell the debate about what he believed.

"Jesus himself only preached for three years."

Since then, Dylan has fallen in and out of artistic favor. These days, he happens to be undergoing iconic refurbishing on a massive level. His image, mostly from the middle years of the 1960s, is everywhere. A new generation of listeners is discovering what the fuss is all about when it comes to evaluating nearly a half century of his music.

With "Christmas in the Heart," Dylan dips into the American music catalog and pulls out versions of these familiar Christmas songs that undercut our commercial expectations by refusing to sound conventionally pretty.

Critiquing the album at the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson described Dylan's voice as sounding like "someone left the karaoke machine on in the emphysema ward of the old folks' home." Ferguson's piece is mostly an anti-Dylan hit job full of moldy ad hominem that equates any appreciation of Dylan with a cultic devotion to the artist divorced from reality. He quotes several of Dylan's weaker self-penned lyrics to suggest a dud like "Wiggle, Wiggle" characterizes his total output.

Now, it would be dishonest of me to suggest that I fell in love with "Christmas in the Heart" the first time I played it. In fact, my wife kept shouting at me to turn it off. Her head spun on her shoulders in a creepy homage to Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." That only hardened my determination to give the CD a fair hearing.

OK, so his vocal chords sound like they blew out on "Little Drummer Boy" and "Do You Hear What I Hear?" but, so what? Dylan can't quite hit the high notes on "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," but he doesn't need to. Before he turned 25, Bob Dylan wrote "Like a Rolling Stone," "Visions of Johanna," "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and "Girl from the North Country."

Given his amazing track record, I'm inclined to listen to "Christmas in the Heart" with all the charity and goodwill the holiday demands. Having played it roughly 10 times since buying it, I can truly say it doesn't freak me out anymore. It's not recommended to narrow-minded people who prefer a saccharine-drenched listening experience for the holidays, though.

Most of us don't have pretty singing voices. "Christmas in the Heart" reconnects us to the great American Christmas song tradition regardless of what we sound like. Isn't that worth celebrating?

Tony's Take on Comix by Tony Norman is featured exclusively in the Opinion section on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.