The carols were arranged for chorus and orchestra by famed Broadway orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett.

The album was a great success, with first-year sales exceeding 100,000 units, even as the then-recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred on November 22, 1963, cast a pall over Christmas for many Americans that year.

Orchestral score and parts are now rented by European American Music.

In 1983, two years after Robert Russell Bennett's death, Shaw recorded a somewhat revised digital stereo version of The Many Moods of Christmas, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, released that December by Telarc.

The Shaw/Atlanta recording remains a popular seller, and had eclipsed the out-of-print 1963 version before the latter's digital release on a 1997 CD.