Hello friends, season’s greetings, and welcome back to one of my favorite holiday traditions. Somehow, someway, you have found A Very Sufjan Christmas, a project dedicated to celebrating the massive 100-plus-song catalog of Christmas music by Sufjan Stevens. Each holiday season, we enlist friends and strangers alike to publish an essay every day from December 1st until Christmas Day, each dedicated to a different song from this massive body of holiday music.

I started this project back in 2018, ran it for four years, and by the end, we had collectively written about Sufjan’s entire Christmas oeuvre. After a few years away, in 2025 I decided to start the project over again from the top, putting all 100 songs back on the menu and tapping an entirely new group of friends, writers, and collaborators to share their thoughts on Santa Suf’s wintry work. This year, we pick right back up where we left off and continue to whittle away at the remaining 75 songs.

I’ll keep this short and to the point. If you are interested in contributing to this year’s edition of A Very Sufjan Christmas, please head over to this page and fill out the application. I’ll work with you to hone your writing and share the best version of your holiday ruminations. It’s first come, first served, so if there’s a song you absolutely want to write about, don’t wait around to throw your hat in the ring.

The format for this project is truly open: you could break down the song itself, talk about your specific associations, write a poem, dive into historical background, break down the sociological implications, or tell a completely fictional story inspired by the music. If you want to explore the possibilities, there are 125 examples from previous years that you can go and read right now. The most important thing to me is that we honor the spirit of the source material, capturing the mishmash of traditions, religion, comfort, conflict, and alienation that the holidays bring. If that sounds like something you’re into, I’d love for you to be one of this year’s 25 writers.

To be completely truthful, I am busier, more spread-out, and more scattered than I’ve ever been. I spent a while debating whether I even had the time and energy to run A Very Sufjan Christmas another year, but kept coming back to the same thing: I love this. It’s a lot of chasing people down over email, late-night edits, and early-morning publishing, but it truly is a gift to be able to read and share everyone’s interpretations of these songs. Like I said, this has become one of my favorite holiday traditions, and I look forward to sharing it with you all once again.

Thank you and happy holidays.
I’ll see you all in December.

– Taylor Grimes