Early signs, milestone birthdays, and a few things worth keeping an eye on as the year takes shape.
The best time to start paying attention to Christmas music is, in its own quiet way, right now. Not because everything has been announced — most of it hasn’t — but because the clues tend to arrive before the declarations do. An album reaches a significant birthday. An artist spends a year building a sound that seems made for December. Someone mentions in an interview, almost in passing, that there are songs already recorded and sitting in a drawer.
By October, most of the decisions have already been made. Which makes June a perfectly reasonable time to start watching.
The most concrete news of the season so far comes from a somewhat unexpected corner. Steven Page — co-founder of Barenaked Ladies, Canadian Music Hall of Fame inductee, one of the most immediately recognizable voices in modern pop — has announced a holiday album called Steven’s Greetings, due this fall, with a full North American tour to follow. The album will include new originals, traditional holiday songs, and something particularly interesting for anyone who grew up listening to Barenaked Ladies: holiday songs Page wrote during his years with the band. That history has a wrinkle worth knowing. When the Ladies made Barenaked for the Holidays in 2004, Page later admitted the record was not his idea and that a holiday-themed album wasn’t really what he wanted to do at the time. So Steven’s Greetings, arriving more than two decades later, is in some sense the Christmas album he actually wanted to make — on his own terms, with his own trio, at his own pace. For fans of his voice and his songwriting, this is a genuinely exciting announcement.
Then there is Kylie Minogue, who ended 2025 on something of a festive high. Her tenth-anniversary edition Kylie Christmas (Fully Wrapped) arrived in early December with four new original tracks and went straight to number one in the United Kingdom — her eleventh chart-topper there. The new edition included the Amazon original “XMAS,” a track she has described as having lived rent-free in her head since the summer of 2015. She was on a terrace at Soho House in Berlin when the idea first arrived, she told The Sun — a few months after the original Kylie Christmas sessions had wrapped, simply mucking around with her guitarist in the heat. It took a decade to finally come out. What made the interviews around the release worth noting was something she told NYLON almost as an aside: there were more songs from the recent sessions, another couple of them, that would stay on the shelf until next time. Given that “XMAS” spent ten years on that shelf, she clearly has patience with holiday material. Whether next time turns out to mean Christmas 2026 nobody can say for certain, but she is one of very few artists who has publicly acknowledged having unreleased Christmas songs already recorded and waiting.
Laufey, meanwhile, has been telling a quieter story — possibly the more interesting one in the long run. The Icelandic-Chinese singer has been steadily building a holiday catalogue since 2024, when she released “Christmas Magic,” an original written for the Amazon film Red One, and added it to a small EP called A Very Laufey Holiday. In 2025 she returned with an expanded edition, adding new covers and making it one of the most quietly lovely releases of the season. The jazz-inflected, string-warmed sound she has developed over three studio albums sits alongside mid-century Christmas recordings in a way almost no other contemporary artist can quite manage. When she covers “Santa Baby” or “Winter Wonderland,” it reads less like a stretch and more like natural territory. Given how steadily she has been adding to this catalogue, a full Christmas album at some point seems less like speculation than a matter of time.
Lady A have also confirmed their return to the holiday road, announcing their This Winter’s Night Tour 2026 — an eight-night December run closing with two nights at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville just before Christmas. No new music has been announced to accompany the tour, but a group that has now released two holiday albums and committed to an annual December run feels like a natural candidate to eventually add to that catalogue.
Anniversaries Worth Marking
Several significant Christmas albums turn milestone ages this autumn, and the occasion is worth pausing on.
Christmas by Michael Bublé came out in October 2011, which means this autumn it turns fifteen. The album has never really left — it returns to holiday charts every single year, remains a fixture on Christmas radio worldwide, and has sold more than sixteen million copies, placing it among the best-selling albums of the century. For the tenth anniversary in 2021, Bublé marked the occasion with a Super Deluxe box set featuring a hardbound book, exclusive vinyl, a making-of documentary, and enough wrapping paper and ornaments to see a family through the season in some style. The fifteenth anniversary is a natural moment to do something again. Nothing has been announced, but the date is sitting right there on the calendar.
October 2016 was a particularly fertile month for holiday music. A Very Kacey Christmas arrived on the 28th, and A Pentatonix Christmas five days earlier — two albums that have both aged remarkably well and will each turn ten this autumn. Kacey Musgraves described making her holiday record as one of the most enriching musical experiences of her career. She wanted to create a whimsical throwback that evoked nostalgia and simpler times, and she largely succeeded, bringing in Willie Nelson, Leon Bridges, and The Quebe Sisters alongside four originals including “Present Without a Bow,” a quietly devastating song about the emotional weight of the season that remains, a decade on, one of the finest original Christmas songs of the modern era. Pentatonix’s album, meanwhile, went to number one on the Billboard 200 and has sold more than a million copies worldwide. The group released their eighth Christmas album just last year, so a new project seems unlikely in the near term — but both anniversaries are worth noting as genuine milestones in the recent history of holiday music.
Artists to Watch
Beyond the confirmed news, a handful of artists are worth keeping an eye on for different reasons.
Cher has now released holiday music three years running — a Christmas album in 2023, a deluxe edition in 2024, and a brand new standalone single, “Christmas Is Here,” in December 2025. Three consecutive years is a pattern, not a coincidence, and whether it builds toward something larger in 2026 is one of the more interesting questions hovering over the season.
Former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach mentioned in an interview earlier this year that at some point in his life he needed to make a Christmas album. He already knows what he wants it to sound like: not electric guitars and rock arrangements, but a traditional piano and organ record drawing on the sacred music he sang as a boy in an Anglican church in Peterborough, Ontario. Nothing has been announced, and he acknowledged that the pace of touring makes it hard to find the space to record. But it is a vivid and specific vision, and the idea of Bach bringing that voice and that particular reverence to a set of traditional carols is genuinely intriguing.
Then there is the vinyl thread, which is smaller but telling. Actress and singer-songwriter Alicia Witt recently shared that she was visiting United Record Pressing in Nashville — the largest and oldest vinyl manufacturer in the country — where her forthcoming new album is being prepared alongside colored vinyl re-pressings of two earlier records, including her holiday album I Think I’m Spending Christmas With You. It is a small story in isolation, but it fits into something larger. The past couple of years have seen a quiet but sustained wave of Christmas music arriving or returning on vinyl — Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas received a lavish pressing sourced from the original master tapes in 2025, Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas was reissued with tracks making their vinyl debut for the first time, and Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song got its first proper audiophile treatment on LP. Christmas music may have a particular affinity for the format — something about the warmth of the sound, the ritual of putting a record on, the sense that the season deserves a more deliberate kind of listening.
Among the names fans tend to mention when the conversation turns to who should make a Christmas record, a few come up consistently: Teddy Swims, whose warmth and soulfulness seems made for the season; Benson Boone, whose emotional, theatrical voice could make for a striking holiday debut; and Sabrina Carpenter, who has exactly the wit and warmth that makes a great Christmas song feel effortless rather than assembled. None of them have announced anything. But the most memorable Christmas arrivals have always tended to be the ones nobody quite expected.
A few questions will be worth following as the year develops. Will Steven’s Greetings find the audience it deserves? Will Kylie release the songs she mentioned having set aside? Will Bublé mark fifteen years? Will A Very Kacey Christmas get the anniversary treatment it deserves? Will Cher’s holiday run extend to a fourth year? Will Lady A add to their catalogue? Will Sebastian Bach find the window?
And the question that never quite gets answered until it does: will 2026 produce a new original song that earns a permanent place in the seasonal canon? The next song people are still playing in 2040 is probably already written. December will tell us which one it is.