Since it’s Christmas Eve, we’re turning back the calendar to enjoy holiday classics from the Jets, Ondara, Gaelynn Lea, Sweetwater Revival, and Robert Robinson. For more Minnesota holiday music, check out this 89-track playlist.

Do you know a Minnesota music video you’d like to see featured in the biweekly Friday Five? E-mail fridayfive@mpr.org.

The Jets, “Christmas In My Heart”

The biggest Minnesota family band since the Andrews Sisters, the Jets released a holiday classic with their 1986 Christmas album. As this music video for “Christmas In My Heart” demonstrates, candle supplies were much less scarce in those days before The Bachelor bought them all up. “We taped this video in the rehearsal space,” remembered producer Darrell Brand. “It was an emotional shoot that brought out a superb performance by Liz!”

The video’s director was Stephen Rivkin - brother of the Revolution’s Bobby Z and music producer David Z. Stephen Rivkin would later be nominated for an Academy Award for his editing work on Avatar.

Ondara, “Mother Christmas”

The vapor from St. Paul’s District Energy plume plant has rarely looked so evocative as it does rising into the night sky in the opening of Ondara’s 2017 “Mother Christmas” video.

As Andrea Swensson wrote that year, “Ondara came to Minnesota from Nairobi, Kenya, four years ago to pursue music and ‘find his footing,’ as he sings, but that journey has come with a cost: he hasn't seen his mother since he left home.

"‘I actually wrote it in Winona,’ Ondara recalls. ‘I was there and it was around Christmastime, I was missing my mother, and I just plugged my guitar in and wrote a song about that.’"

Sweetwater Revival, “A Minnesota Christmas”

“The Female Quartet of Southern Gospel Music” keep their harmonies tight, but they leave room for the Holy Spirit in this lilting ode to family and faith in the great Gopher State.

The venue for this live performance video may be the high church of consumerism rather than a cathedral of Christ, but when that camera pulls back for a wide shot of the towering snow-flecked trees in the Huntington Bank Rotunda just as the foursome break into an interpolated chorus of “May the Circle Be Unbroken,” you’d swear you can see the Star of David shining through the Nickelodeon Universe skylight.

Sweetwater Revival are already planning their 2022 Hallelujah Homecoming Concert for Aug. 13 at Trinity Church in Lakeville.

Gaelynn Lea, “Silent Night”

Gaelynn Lea’s stunning rendition of this Christmas classic, realized by looping her violin and adding her evocative voice, appears on her 2016 holiday album Deepest Darkness, Brightest Dawn. This version was recorded live in her Duluth kitchen during the dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. “Don’t read the comments” may be an internet maxim for good reason, but if you bend it to see what people are saying on YouTube, you’ll appreciate how powerfully her music has affected listeners around the world.

Lea will offer online concerts throughout the winter; her original music will also be heard on Broadway this spring, in a new production of Macbeth.

Robert Robinson, Christmas concert

There are few voices as divine as that of Minnesota gospel great Robert Robinson, as you can appreciate in this 30-minute excerpt from one of his Christmas concerts.

BONUS: Emily Haavik, “All Is Bright”

Sure, this feature is the Friday Five…but when this clip came out just as I was writing this post, I knew I had to squeeze it in. “All Is Bright” is a new holiday song from Duluth-via-Minneapolis singer-songwriter Emily Haavik; a candlelit video captures the song’s message of hope, and proceeds from downloads go to support a GoFundMe for a friend who’s undergoing cancer treatment. You can hear this song and more in a special holiday episode of the Duluth Local Show.