Bootleg Betty
Happy 20th Anniversary to Bette Midler’s Cool Yule
By Mister D
October 10, 2026.
Cool Yule is Bette Midler’s first holiday album. It was released on October 10, 2006, by Columbia Records. The album runs about 37 minutes and mixes Christmas standards with a seasonal rewrite of “From a Distance.” Robbie Buchanan produced the album, with Jay Landers serving as executive producer.
Awards and chart performance. Its main industry recognition is a nomination at the 50th Grammy Awards (February 2008) for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. It lost to Michael Bublé’s Call Me Irresponsible. Other nominees that year were James Taylor at Christmas, Barbra Streisand’s Live in Concert 2006, and Queen Latifah’s Trav’lin’ Light. It did not win, and no other major awards for the album turn up in standard listings.
On the charts it was modest but steady for a seasonal release.
Billboard 200 peak: No. 33 (week of December 6, 2006, on about 47,000 copies that week)
Top Holiday Albums: No. 6
Digital Albums: No. 13
By July 2007 it had sold about 271,000 copies in the U.S. (Nielsen SoundScan). It does not appear on RIAA Gold/Platinum lists.
The Christmas version of “From a Distance” was the single and reached No. 13 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart.
Track highlights and trivia
Standard tracks include “Merry Christmas,” the title song “Cool Yule” (Steve Allen / Eric Kornfeld), “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” a medley of “Winter Wonderland” / “Let It Snow!” with Johnny Mathis, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?,” “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “Mele Kalikimaka,” the Christmas version of “From a Distance,” and “White Christmas.”
Notable details:
Title track comes from a 1950s hipster holiday song by Steve Allen.
The Mathis duet pairs her with a longtime Christmas-album mainstay; AllMusic noted the album was unlikely to displace Mathis’s own holiday records but still called it a strong set of standards.
“Mele Kalikimaka” nods to Midler’s Hawaiian upbringing and uses steel guitar.
The “From a Distance” rewrite adds special holiday lyrics by Jay Landers to Julie Gold’s original. (The 1990 hit was nominated for Record of the Year; Song of the Year went to the writers, not Midler.)
Target editions added the bonus track “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”
A music video was made for the title song.
Critics generally liked the orchestra and her mix of camp (“Cool Yule,” “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm”) and warmer ballad readings; some found the arrangements familiar rather than reinvented. The Detroit News gave it an A?.
It sits in her Columbia period between the Peggy Lee and later greatest-hits projects, and is her only full Christmas studio album.
