Last night my flatmate and me sat down to a game of pandemic and while we were saving the world had the first two Icelandic Christmas beers: Malt Christmas beer from Egils and Christmas beer from Víking. We chose them because they were the only ones in cans and because they are from the main breweries and our expectations were not high and we wanted to keep the better beers for later days.

Egils Malt Jólabjór
There is an Icelandic tradition to drink non-alcoholic malt beer mixed with orange lemonade over the holidays. This is the alcoholic version of the malt beer. It has sugar and licorice inside.
Christmassiness: On a cultural level, this is very much a Christmas taste. It is also very lazy, taking a drink which is already associated with Christmas and adding alcohol.
Overall tastiness: Like the original you would have to mix it with something to make the sticky sweetness of it bearable.

Víking Jólabjór
The special ingredient here is caramelized barley. It smells like beer. It tastes like red ale.
Christmassiness: It tastes like normal red ale, it might as well be a summer beer.
Overall tastiness: It is a solid red ale, I like red ales, so I liked this.

The winner:
Víking Jólabjór, because it is the one which actually tastes ok.