Taylor Swift’s Best Holiday Songs: ‘Tis the Damn Season,’ ‘New Year’s Day’ and More
’Tis the damn season! The holidays may come once a year, but Taylor Swift’s Christmastime catalog is the gift that keeps on giving — all year round. The Grammy winner released her Christmas album, The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection (originally titled Taylor Swift: Sounds of the Season), in 2007. She dropped two original festive tracks on the record — “Christmases When You Were Mine,” and “Christmas Must Be Something More” — in addition to country-tinged covers of several holiday classics, including “White Christmas” and “Santa Baby.” While the Holiday Collection is Swift’s only album of Christmas songs, the singer-songwriter has an innate love of the festive season due to growing up on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania. (In addition to her tune “Christmas Tree Farm” about this childhood experience, the “Maroon” artist has also sprinkled in bits of holiday cheer throughout various songs over the years.) “I actually did grow up on a Christmas tree farm,” Swift wrote via Twitter in December 2019, upon the release of the track. “In a gingerbread house, deep within the yummy gummy gumdrop forest. Where, funnily enough, this song is their national anthem.” Five years earlier, the “Cardigan” singer took Esquire on a tour of her hometown — and her childhood farm. “It was such a weird place to grow up,” she told the magazine in 2014. “But it has cemented in me this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then the holiday season. My friends are so sick of me talking about autumn coming. They’re like, ‘What are you, an elf?'” Since then, Swift has come out with a number of songs that mention Christmastime. Most direct is her Reputation track "New Year’s Day," which details a New Year’s Eve party and holding onto a loved one in the aftermath. “There's glitter on the floor after the party / Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby,” she sings on the pre-chorus. “Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor, You and me from the night before.” The chorus follows: “But don’t read the last page / But I stay when you're lost and I'm scared and you’re turning away / I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day.” On 2020’s Evermore, Swift sings about a hometown love when coming home for the holidays on “’Tis the Damn Season.” Another fan-favorite tune with a Christmas mention is 2014’s “Begin Again,” the last track on Red. “But you start to talk / About the movies that your family watches / Every single Christmas / And I wanna talk about that,” the “Tim McGraw” artist croons on the bridge. Keep scrolling for all the holiday mentions in Swift’s lengthy discography:
