Elizabeth Chan on Her 15th Straight Holiday Album, ‘Christmas Unhinged’
Elizabeth Chan is in her 15th consecutive year of releasing a new Christmas album every year, and going through a divorce and becoming a single mom was not about to put a stop to that personal and professional tradition. She considers all 15 of those records to be reflective of where she was in the year leading up to the season, and the fact that home-and-hearth look a little different for her in 2025 is duly reflected in “Christmas Unhinged.”
The title of this year’s release is a reference to Hinge, which has been Chan’s post-divorce dating app of choice this past year. She could have gone with something a little cornier, because, as she jokes, “This chapter is called ‘Single Bells, Single All the Way.’”
In all seriousness, Chan says, “I felt like I could really speak to everyone that listens to my Christmas music and Christmas music lovers everywhere to understand what kind of Christmas I was having this year, and why it’s OK to live Christmas not just in, like, a snow globe of time, but as an actual living, lived experience.”
Perhaps you’re familiar with Chan for the legend that has built up around her as the only artist of note to have devoted her recorded output exclusively to Christmas music, which was a hot take a decade ago, let alone 15 years into her unbroken streak. Or perhaps you became aware of her as the artist who put up a challenge to Mariah Carey, and prevailed; Carey attempted to trademark the term “Queen of Christmas,” and Chan went to court to block it, contending that she had also been using it or had it applied to her going back as many or more years. (Carey eventually stopped further action in the trademark pursuit, leading the judge to dismiss it and leave the slogan in the public domain.) If you’re unfamiliar with any of those parts of Chan’s story, you can retrace the footprints through the snow via previous Variety articles, including this origin story.
But for 2025, we had a very-late-in-the-season catchup with Chan about whether “Christmas Unhinged” is officially a divorce album, and what it’s been like to return the dating field and eventually have to explain to all possible suitors just what it is that she’s known for.
The answer might be evident to anyone who knows you, but the question is: Why put out a Christmas album that reflects your divorce?
This is definitely new emotional territory for me. But if you step back and look at all 15 chapters of my life in Christmas music, what makes my Christmas music so distinctive is that at the end of the year where we’re all taking inventory of where we are in our milestones of living, I curate my albums to capture the snapshot of where I am. And if I’m getting divorced, there are millions of other people just like me, who are facing the holidays without their spouse or without their family members as they know it, or their traditions have been upended. I’m not the only one. So it’s a tremendous honor to be able to create the kind of Christmas songs that are lacking if we only hold onto “A Holly Jolly Christmas.” I can grow with my Christmas canon and share some songs that might inspire others to embrace all of the holiday season — the good, the bad and the unknown.
Would you go so far as to call this your Christmas divorce record?
I think that last year was more my Christmas divorce record, with the album I called “Shatterproof.” I actually filed for divorce last year and I was going through so much internal turmoil, but I wasn’t ready to share it all yet. I processed the impending end of my marriage in the last album as safely as I could process it. I only do Christmas music, but this is how I process my emotions as an artist; it’s very cathartic to me. “Christmas Unhinged” is what happens once I decided to be divorced and embark on rediscovering myself, not focusing so much on the pain of divorce, but the opportunity of becoming who I’m meant to be in the second act of my life. As a single mom, it’s a beautiful thing. You know, divorce starts very sad, but there’s so much opportunity, because once you’ve been so down, the only place you can go is up, and I’ve never felt more myself in many years than I do right now.
You have talked on your social media about what it’s like to date now as the self-proclaimed Queen of Christmas and how men react to that.
Especially while I was dating people during the beginning of the Christmas season, which is around September, I started to get really nervous, because this is when I cannot hide this aspect of my life. First of all, I have not even dated in 20 years. So when I had to start even contemplating going out on dates again, and then downloading an app, going through hundreds and hundreds of random pictures and trying to decide, “Hey, do I wanna date you, Random Picture?,” it’s the weirdest thing in the whole world, right? And I got very, very frustrated in the process. So I ended up writing a non-Christmas song called “Love Me Right or Leave Me Alone,” which is sincerely my Hinge-dating mission-status song.
Also, I did a Beatles cover on this record, “Something,” because I feel like there wasn’t a proper female version of that song. And as I was meeting new guys and going on all these dates, I’d be like, “Oh yeah, there’s something about him.” And then I sang it for myself and I put it on Hinge as my mating call.
You got your Beatles on with this record, doubly, because you also covered John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” which you retitled “Happy Ex-mas.”
I do covers only if they transform in the way that I relate to lyrics. When I got divorced, I started to really think about the lyrics to that song, and the one lyric that really helped me in the studio get through all of my pain of divorce was the lyric “War is over if you want it.” Right when you’re in the middle of a divorce, those words are so powerful. And so that is really a message to my ex-husband. Which is not the original intent of the song. But having sung it the way that I did and even retitling it “Happy Ex-Mas” — sorry, Yoko, if you’re not happy about that! — the way that it came out was super cathartic.
Going back to your dating experiences this year, what was it like to tell people what you are famous for?
I’ve dated tons of different types of people from all ethnicities and creeds and cultures, and they get to know me as Elizabeth, and they’ll connect with me if they’re also going through divorce or if they’re single parents. But sometimes the minute that they find out I’m the queen of Christmas, it’s like a needle drops. It’s like, “What does this mean? Do you know I’m Jewish?” or something like that, and I’m like, yeah, it doesn’t matter. But it can become very challenging to people. It’s just been pure comedy.
Maybe they imagine it’s like the Tim Allen movie, and they think they will date you and then they suddenly turn into Santa Claus and grow a big beard and belly.
I feel like the only person who would’ve really tolerated that would’ve been the Mormon potato farmer that I dated. I don’t know how I found this guy in New York. He would’ve been OK with turning into Santa, I’m pretty sure. I went on a coffee date with a Hare Krishna…
I was gonna ask if you had run into any Christmas fetishists who might be really turned on by that part of you.
There was a request from somebody who was really convinced that I should expand into Christmas OnlyFans. And I knew very quickly that this guy was not the guy for me. So yes, I encountered that guy. It was a very awkward conversation because I think he was quite serious about it.
You make it sound, though, like you’ve had fun this year, going through that process, as confounding as it is to someone coming back into the dating world in the age of apps.
I have to step back and laugh because the whole ridiculousness of dating in this day and age is so unlike how I remember dating back in the day, where you would go to a bar and then maybe get someone’s number and start dating, and then it was just that person until it faded out. Now it doesn’t even feel like dating; it feels like a messed-up video game. The worst term we had back then was fading out on somebody. Now we’ve got rostering, we’ve got ghosting, we have submarining, we have breadcrumbing, we have all kinds of stuff. You know how in Alaska they have a thousand names for snow? In dating, there’s a thousand names for disinterest.
Wait, you are going to have to explain some of these terms, to someone who is not out in the field. “Ghosting” I get, but what were some of the others you mentioned?
“Rosters” means when people have more than one person that they date casually… “Submarining” is not quite ghosting, which is where someone just completely goes like the Ghost of Christmas Past on you and they just disappear and there’s no explanation. Submarining is when they kind of go down into the depths of the ocean and you have no idea where they are, and then like maybe a week later or two weeks later, they come back up. It’s like, “Hey, what’s up? I was just down in the ocean. Sorry I couldn’t talk to you. I was in the abyss.”
Times have indeed changed…
And a lot of these profiles are AI-generated. I might be falling in love with robots.
Back on the music: Do you ever consider taking a year off between Christmas albums? Or would that ruin what you’ve got going?
Never. What, you’re asking me now, 15 years in? You could have asked me this eight years in.
Just wondering if it’s ever been a temptation to skip a year, or like in college, taking a gap year.
I think the closest thing to a gap year that I had was when I broke my spine and I couldn’t sing. I had a meeting with my musicians and my co-producers and managers and I let them know that I physically could not stand because I was paralyzed from the left leg down. and I couldn’t even breathe. I had no stability of my diaphragm because I had broken my L1 to L5. I was crying and my daughter was sitting next to me and she was like, “No, mommy, I’m gonna help you sing.” And then my friend Dave Eggar, when I floated around that maybe that might be the year that I wouldn’t be able to do something, was like, “There’s no way.” We always figure it out. So my team around me reminds me, “No, Elizabeth, you have a greater purpose. You must tell your story every Christmas.” I really owe it to my friends in this business who remind me that at the end of the day, I’m an artist, and as an artist, my perspective informs my inspiration, and my inspiration is through my Christmas music. They constantly remind me that what I do is very different, and they’ll hold that space for me and remind me that you’re not allowed to not celebrate a Christmas.
It’s like me asking you: Are you gonna skip a Christmas this year? Have you ever skipped a Christmas?
You know, I have not.
No. Right? So why would I? I mean, I know I do a little extra than you do, but I’m not gonna not celebrate Christmas, and the way that I celebrate Christmas is just the way that I celebrate it, is like, you know, producing new songs and coming up with new albums and presenting them to the world and telling my story one Christmas at a time. Why would I not want to do that?
I got behind in thinking about the season, and I did not put any lights up till the 22nd this year, but I feel like this conversation has helped me round a corner.
See, my magic powers prevail. I’m sure that you know if you need some Christmas backup, all you have to do is call and ask. I am the Queen of Christmas. Like, I know some people.
