"Appreciating her reason for the season — parties — is the running theme.

'There was not a song out there that quite celebrated the season the way that it was meaningful to me,' Gasteyer says. 'I knew right out of the gate that it was going to be a record celebrating seasonal secular favorites. I'm not a very religious person, but I love a party, and I love jollity and humor and gaiety.'

Even though we have a higher threshold for silliness in holiday music, Gasteyer tried to avoid her own pitfalls.

'The root of what I find funny is overearnestness,' she says. 'It's also the Achilles' heel of anyone who's been driving in another lane and suddenly wants to make music.'

Her solution was to lean into cocktail lounge jazz, or what Gasteyer calls 'this late '50s/early '60s entertainers' era music' — music from a time in which it was more common for entertainers to mingle across artistic disciplines. But avoiding overearnestness didn't mean she didn't have any fun with it."

— NPR