With Christmas around the corner, Olivia Rodrigo is embracing the festive spirit early with her first original holiday song, “Take Me Home (4 Christmas).” Rodrigo co-wrote the track with Amy Allen and Dan Nigro, who produced it.
The song arrives with a music video that leans fully into the holidays and the chaos of blending personalities and families. Rodrigo joins a spunky redheaded family’s celebration in an ugly holiday sweater and hastily drawn-on makeup, bringing a slightly sloppy, wine-drunk yet charming energy. In one scene, the family plays Heads Up!, and the name taped to Rodrigo’s forehead humorously turns out to be “Olivia Rodrigo.”
Rodrigo isn’t the only familiar face at the gathering. Saturday Night Live’s Ben Marshall plays her boyfriend, and Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon plays his mother. Together, they guide Rodrigo through every clichéd, family-friendly holiday activity: gingerbread-making, family pictures, wood-chopping and decking the halls, along with some much-needed family-bonding wine sessions.
But don’t let the video’s bright, cheerful ’80s homage fool you. The relationship may not be as cheery and merry as Rodrigo wants to believe. Marshall, her boyfriend, slacks around in the background and is often seen sleeping or hazily lying around while Rodrigo boasts about her hopes of finally securing his commitment in the chorus.
The song’s new-wave bounce is inspired by The Waitresses’ 1981 classic “Christmas Wrapping.” Chris Butler, who wrote that song, shared on Facebook that the pop star emailed him about two months before the release. Although he isn’t credited on “Take Me Home (4 Christmas),” he called the new track an inspired homage and wished the star “monster success” with its release.
Her latest synth-pop holiday track follows reports of her breakup with British actor Louis Partridge. Partridge is believed by fans to have inspired her newest album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, which explores the all-encompassing nature of love — the very best of it, alongside the melancholy that tinges a relationship once the star’s rose-tinted glasses fade. The album provides a cathartic look into a partnership that becomes burdened by distance, misunderstandings, and chronic suffering that Rodrigo must recognize internally to change her circumstances, as echoed in the track “the cure.”
It also isn’t the only holiday announcement. A bonus track called “miss this christmas,” available on vinyl and cassette, is also making waves for Rodrigo’s fans. It’s a slow and swooning ballad marked by a December heartbreak. Fans may speculate that it relates to Partridge.
Fans may also catch that Nixon’s casting is a nod to one of Rodrigo’s longtime muses: the HBO series Sex and the City, a cultural touchstone of the late ’90s and early 2000s. Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in April, Rodrigo shared that she has watched every episode about three times and that several songs on You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love were inspired by the complicated, on-and-off relationship between Miranda Hobbes and Steve Brady. One of them, “maggots for brains,” echoes a scene from the show’s second-season finale in which Miranda tells Steve that whenever something funny happens, she wants to tell him.
It also isn’t the first time that Marshall has played Rodrigo’s fictional boyfriend. Her May 2 appearance on Saturday Night Live sees Marshall as an ex-boyfriend in a sketch, making him the obvious first choice for the role.
Rodrigo is currently on her Unraveled Tour, with dates across the United States and Canada through Dec. 20. The tour takes a brief break before resuming in January, so fans may hear the new song live as Christmas approaches.