It looks like Celine Dion will be under a lot of Christmas trees this

year.

The pop singer's 1990s retrospective, All the Way: A Decade of Song,

was the biggest beneficiary of the holiday shopping season's opening week,

selling enough copies to assure a leap from #3 to #1 on this week's

Billboard 200 albums chart. Nearly 400,000 copies of the album

were sold during the week ending Sunday, up from 300,000 a week earlier,

according to SoundScan data released Wednesday (Dec.1).

Sales of All the Way: A Decade of Song, which includes such major

hits as "My Heart Will Go On" (RealAudio

excerpt), easily outdistanced those of Metallica's symphonic live

album, S&M, which will debut at #2 with sales of just more than

300,000 copies, according to SoundScan.

This week's chart also will see high debuts from Nas, Garth Brooks, the

Dave Matthews Band and the Beastie Boys and relatively modest debuts from

Third Eye Blind and Beck.

In the top 10 are: All the Way: A Decade of Song (#1); S&M

(#2); rapper Dr. Dre's Dr. Dre 2001 (#3); pop group the Backstreet

Boys' Millennium (#4); hard-rock band Korn's Issues (dropping

from #1 to #5); teen-pop singer Britney Spears' ... Baby

One More Time (#6); Nas' Nastradamus (#7); Latin-rock band

Santana's Supernatural (#8); Will Smith's Willennium (#9);

and pop singer Christina Aguilera's self-titled debut (#10).

Album sales rose across the board last week, and plenty of Christmas albums

got a boost. Country star Brooks' The Magic of Christmas debuted

at #13. Jazz saxophonist Kenny G's Faith: A Holiday Album climbed

from #23 to #14, pop-gospel singer Amy Grant's A Christmas to Remember

from #41 to #36, and singer/songwriter Jewel's Joy: A Holiday Collection

from #51 up to #43.

Other albums seeing big sales gains included Millennium, which

sold 91,000 more copies last week than the week before, and country singer

Shania Twain's Come On Over, which will jump from #24 to #11

following her Thanksgiving Day concert special on CBS.

S&M, a two-CD live set chronicling Metallica's two April performances

with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, sold enough copies that in any

other week it could have debuted at #1. It includes two new songs as well

as new renditions of such crowd favorites as "Master of Puppets"

(RealAudio

excerpt).

"Mixing these songs was so hard. Really difficult," singer/guitarist James

Hetfield said in November. "It was really a learning experience for all

of us."

The holiday sales push was not so kind to rappers. Nas, whose third album,

I Am ..., debuted at #1 with sales of 470,000 in April, premiered

with sales of 232,172 for Nastradamus. It's a concept album named

for the 16th-century French mystic Nostradamus.

Wu-Tang Clan rapper Raekwon's second solo album, Immobilarity,

plummeted from #9 to #58, and Kurupt's Tha Streetz Iz a Mutha

dropped from #31 to #92. New Orleans rapper Juvenile's 400 Degreez

gained 10,000 copies in sales for the week but still fell 12 spots to

#37.

Listener Supported, a two-CD live album by one of the country's

most popular concert attractions, the Dave Matthews Band, will debut at

#15, and the Beastie Boys' two-CD retrospective, The Sounds of Science:

The Beastie Boys Anthology, makes its chart entry at #19.

Beck's Midnite Vultures will hit the chart at #34, a modest debut

for the acclaimed singer, whose past two albums, Odelay (1996) and

Mutations (1998) both hit the top 20. On Midnite Vultures,

Beck evokes Prince and Sly Stone in R&B-flavored songs that also draw

inspiration from country, electronic music, Beatles-style rock and hip-hop.

And Third Eye Blind will enter at #40 with Blue, the follow-up to

their quadruple-platinum Third Eye Blind (1997), which featured

"Semi-Charmed Life" and "How's It Going to Be?"

Blue "takes a bigger step," singer Stephan Jenkins said in September.

"This record as a totality is earthy and haunted, and those two adjectives

sort of pervade all the tracks."

The album's first single is "Anything" (RealAudio

excerpt).

Other debuts this week will include Latin-pop singer Enrique Iglesias'

English-language debut, Enrique (#42); country-rock band Caedmon's

Call's 40 Acres (#61); singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette's

Alanis Unplugged, an acoustic live album (#63); teen-pop singer

Jessica Simpson's Sweet Kisses (#65); Phish's six-CD live box set

Hampton Comes Alive (#120); veteran hard-rock band Mötley

Crüe's live album Live: Entertainment or Death (#133);

Alkaholiks rapper Tash's solo album Rap Life (#148); and Christian-rock

band Sonicflood's self-titled debut (#158).

Punk band NOFX will debut at #200 with the 18-minute EP The Decline,

which sold more than 10,000 copies in its first week. The Decline

is a medley of loud, fast punk songs espousing left-wing politics.