A pop star in the middle of nowhere, singing a chorus to no one, until it wouldn’t leave her alone.

Gwen Stefani has told this story enough times that it’s become its own small piece of Christmas folklore.

In the summer of 2017, she was staying at Blake Shelton’s ranch in Oklahoma. She went out for a run past pastures full of the exotic animals Shelton kept on the property — wildebeest included, oddly enough. Half-joking, she asked herself what a Christmas song of hers would even sound like.

A chorus came out of her mouth on the spot. Unplanned, sung out loud to nobody but the animals. That chorus became “Christmas Eve,” one of the first songs written for what would turn into her first full holiday record, You Make It Feel Like Christmas.

The album’s producer, Busbee, had a specific brief for her: something that felt “raw and punk and sort of classical at the same time.” That sent Stefani back toward the holiday albums she’d actually grown up loving — Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, Emmylou Harris’s Light of the Stable — rather than toward anything glossy or contemporary.

The result landed somewhere unexpected for an artist best known for ska-inflected pop: six original songs, co-written almost entirely by Stefani herself, sitting alongside covers stretched just far enough to sound like they belonged to her.

The title track and lead single, a duet with Shelton built on a warm, Motown-leaning backbeat, carries maybe the clearest statement of what Stefani wanted the whole project to be. She’s said outright that she hoped it would become “an annual thing” — a record people reached for every year without thinking twice.

She kept adding to it, too. Between the original release and two later deluxe editions came “Secret Santa,” a cover of “Feliz Navidad” with Chilean singer Mon Laferte, a version of “Last Christmas” performed later on television. It became less a single album than an ongoing project she kept returning to.

There’s something fitting about a Christmas song being born from an unplanned burst of singing in the middle of a pasture, thousands of miles from any studio. Stefani wasn’t trying to write a standard. She was just letting a stray idea out into the open air — and months later, deciding it was good enough to build an entire holiday season around.