Michael Bublé’s father, Lewis, spent years as a commercial salmon fisherman off the coast of British Columbia — work Bublé himself did alongside him for six summers starting at fourteen, calling it some of the hardest physical work he’s ever known. But it was his grandfather, Demetrio Santagà, an Italian-born plumber, who shaped the singer. Demetrio paid for Bublé’s early vocal lessons and, when Bublé was sixteen, started offering free plumbing work to local nightclub owners in exchange for stage time for his grandson. Whatever else explains Bublé’s ease with this material, growing up with a grandfather who literally traded labor to get him in front of an audience is a hard thing to overstate.

When Christmas came out in October 2011, it entered a genre where the big names had been dead or retired for decades — Crosby, Sinatra, Nat King Cole — and where a new entry usually reads as tribute at best, imitation at worst. Bublé’s didn’t. Producer David Foster helped shape an album that sounded less like a costume and more like someone finishing a sentence his family had been saying at Christmas his whole life.

It sold well over 10 million copies worldwide and keeps returning to the charts every December, over a decade later — respectable numbers, but not really the interesting part. The interesting part is what he did with the room those numbers bought him: “Cold December Night,” a song he co-wrote, sits on the same tracklist as material written before his parents were born, and nobody notices the seam. A 2012 reissue paired him with Shania Twain on “White Christmas,” two Canadians singing an American standard about longing for home neither of them had ever actually left.

Ten years after the album’s release, NBC gave it its own celebration: Michael Bublé’s Christmas in the City, taped at Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center with guests including Jimmy Fallon and Kermit the Frog, built entirely around songs from the original record. Few artists get a network special built around a single album a decade after the fact — fewer still have earned it by simply continuing to mean it, year after year. Bublé has said in interviews that his relationship with the album’s success shifted around 2016 and 2017, while his young son Noah was undergoing treatment for cancer; he’s spoken about coming to feel real gratitude for a song people wanted to hear from him every December, rather than treating it as a career footnote.

Bublé didn’t just get invited into the Christmas music canon late. He kept showing up for it, through a decade of NBC specials and a genuinely hard family stretch, and at some point that stopped looking like luck and started looking like belonging.