By RAY WADDLE?

The strange and powerful thing about a nativity scene (any nativity scene) is this: no one talks.

The characters -- Mary, Joseph, Magi, shepherds, baby Jesus -- don’t speak. They follow the biblical script, where only angels have speaking parts at the Christmas birth site.

I think this explains today the overwhelming presence of music during the holidays. Words don’t quite cut it. Composers understand this. (So do merchants, starting around Labor Day.) It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach’s Christmas Oratorio or the Jessica Simpson Christmas CD. It’s all a soundtrack for December emotions too deep for words.

Which emotions? Take your pick ... Family memories, family tensions. The excitement of gift-giving, the stress of shopping. The hope of miracles, the puzzle of getting the bills paid. The parties, the flirting, the headache later. The tranquility of a menorah, the scent of a Christmas tree, the wonder of the winter solstice sky. The anxiety about global politics. The sheer mystery of the Incarnation, the story of an infant who revolutionized history, with the Creator behind it all.

It all rushes down in one contradictory holiday jumble of feeling. The music (Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Handel) somehow preserves the emotion in short units, making it manageable, keeping it from annually crushing me.

By now, every forgotten band and celebrity crooner has hurried out a Christmas CD to cash in on this wordless need. Who can blame them? The holiday musical itch stretches way back. Carols emerged in the 12th century. Brenda Lee merged “rockin’’ and “Christmas” in 1958 and upended Western history (at age 16): Her “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” became part of the emotional landscape.?Vince Guaraldi’s sweetly melancholy piano jazz for the Charlie Brown Christmas TV special (40 years ago now) provided my first serious holiday music memory. When Bing Crosby teamed with glam rocker David Bowie for “Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy’’ in 1977, it was obvious that holiday music was mutating in irresistible ways.

Everyone keeps a favorite holiday CD playlist. Here’s a personal top 10:

1. Carols from Wightman Chapel (Aeolian) by the Scarritt-Bennett Singers -- This music samples a traditional English Lessons and Carols service. From the opening notes of “Ding dong! Merrily on high,” the record offers blessed assurance: Advent is finally here.

2. Christmas Concertos (Archiv) by the English Concert -- This is baroque music with the purity of winter air. (Note a new release of an old beauty: Charpentier’s Christmas Messe de Minuit , performed by New Trinity Baroque and Canterbury Choir.)

3. Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas (Verve) by Ella Fitzgerald -- Others have tried to make Frosty the Snow Man swing, but Ella is queen.

4. On Yoolis Night: Medieval Carols and Motets (Harmonia Mundi) by Anonymous 4 -- These four women offer a cappella music from 700 years ago. Sobering, meditative, the music (and their other Christmas CDs) suggests a planet floating toward its spiritual destiny.

5. The Sinatra Christmas Album by Frank Sinatra (Capitol) -- Sinatra has only two rivals for old-school vocals and heart, Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett (See his Snowfall: The Tony Bennett Christmas Album.)

6. The Very Best of Celtic Christmas (Windham Hill) by various artists -- Violin, mandolin, harp ... acoustic instruments (plus synthesizers) that strip yuletide down to simple beauty.

7. The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (Fuel 2000) by Jethro Tull -- Fans always suspected this ’70s band had one foot in progressive rock, the other in Elizabethan melody. Somehow it works.

8. Messiah by Georg Frederick Handel -- Handel is inevitable, framing the season from start to finish. Give in. (I have the Robert Shaw version on Telarc.)

9. An Oscar Peterson Christmas (Telarc) by pianist Peterson and friends -- This is a mellow gem by a elegant jazz master, in a small-group setting. (For holiday jazz with edge, try Jingle Bell Jazz. )

10. The Carol Album (EMI, 2 vol.) by Taverner Consort, Choir and Players -- This is a stately mix across seven centuries (O Come O Come Emmanuel, I Wonder as I Wander) -- music stepping in to fill out the holy silences of long-ago events. Tis the season for what holiday music delivers – sonic poetry, festivity and charity, over and over again.

(Columnist Ray Waddle can be contacted at ray@raywaddle.com.)