KATE Rusby At Christmas is in its 11th year now, and on the evidence of the 2016 tour that has done better than ever at the box office, her alternative carol services are becoming a staple of the winter festive celebrations.

The Barnsley nightingale, who veers closer in spirit to the good fairy than the snow queen in these Christmas shows, sold out her Harrogate Royal Hall concert last Thursday and was very close to repeating that feat only 21 miles down the A59 at York Barbican three nights later.

Rusby at Christmas always involves folk queen Kate and "our boys and the brass boys": her regular folk band and a quintet of prime-beef brass band players she now calls The Valves, as the siren voice of South Yorkshire is wrapped in the official sound of Yorkshire.

Together they perform "strange South Yorkshire pub versions" of carols and winter songs, once banned from churches by Victorian miseries for being so brazenly jolly, but long given refuge amid the foaming pints for sing-songs from November through to New Year's Day.

Kate first heard them as she "sat with pop and sweets and colouring books" in the tap room as a child and she has since tracked down myriad variations on While Shepherds Watched, 31 so far. Once she finds 50, she will play them all in one concert, she jests.

Kate is in one of her sparkling winter dresses, like she was for last year's shows, but there is something new on the Barbican stage to the side of guitarist and banjo player Damien O'Kane and she's not moving, she has antlers and baubles that light up.

She's Ruby Rusby, a stuffed toy reindeer, the size of a pony, says Rusby, when she had been expecting something more akin to a Labrador. Come the second set, Ruby will be wearing a necklace of sprouts and bearing a message that calls her "the wind section", courtesy of O'Kane's Irish humour.

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These shows are as much about such humour and joy and badinage between Kate and the bands as they are about cherry picking from her three Christmas albums. The huge hand-crocheted snowflakes have gone from the stage design but in comes not only Ruby but also beautiful lighting of changing colours to suit each song.

Kate drinks Throat Coat from her Yorkshire Tea mug to keep her voice so snow-white pure and reaches for a fleece, as the night turns chill but not the mood, where the opening Here I Come A Wassailing and three variations on While Shepherds Watched are each jollier than the last.

Hunter Moon, from this year's Life In A Paper Boat album, may not be a Christmas song, but its pining tale of the moon's love for the sun sits as well in the two sets as does Kate's Christmas Day walk song, the magically all-is-quiet The Frost Is All Over.

Not only Yorkshire has these jaunty carols, so too Cornwall, here best represented by Sunny Bank's revamp of I Saw Three Ships. Rusby goes big band for Winter Wonderland, neither Yorkshire nor Cornish, and with a fourth Christmas promised next winter, Kate gives hint of what lies in store by introducing Richard Thompson's We Sing Hallelujah and best of all, The Christmas Goose.

To finish, out come the capes for Big Brave Bill, the Barnsley superhero song that could surely have given a Christmas novelty hit, if only such Jona Lewie-style things still happened.