Kathy Mattea plots her annual Christmas tour

Country singer Kathy Mattea, who has embarked on a Christmas tour every year since the release of her Grammy-winning, 1993 Christmas album "Good News," plans to take her holiday show to 11 cities this year.

During her November and December shows, Mattea plans to open with a set featuring material from her latest album, "The Innocent Years," as well as her country hits. The Christmas program will follow.

"It's a presentation of the spiritual side of Christmas, and not so much about the holiday," Mattea said about the Christmas concerts in a prepared statement. "I gathered songs for about five years before making "Good News," and when it came time to pull them all out, I realized they were all about the Nativity. Since then, we've added a couple of traditional tunes, but we use our own arrangements and give them a new point of view."

A new Christmas concert titled "Sounds of the Season with Kathy Mattea" is scheduled to air on 20 public television stations this year, according to Mattea's publicist.

"We'd been trying to do [the television special] for years, but we could never get it together--we couldn't get a hall, the money and everything to come together at the same time," Mattea said. "Finally my manager just said 'heck, I'm going to figure out a way to do this ourselves.' That's probably the thing I'm most proud of about it--it's our director, our lighting guy, our show."