Olivia Rodrigo Recruits Cynthia Nixon for Her First-Ever Christmas Song

Olivia Rodrigo has made holiday music before, but never her own. That changed this week: “take me home (4 christmas),” her first original Christmas song, dropped on Thursday night (November 5) at 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET through Interscope — announced on Monday, November 2, and landing with an official video that puts Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon and Saturday Night Live’s Ben Marshall in Christmas sweaters. By Friday morning it was the only release anybody was talking about.

The song itself is a meet-the-parents plea dressed up as a Christmas record. Rodrigo wrote it last summer with her longtime collaborator Dan Nigro and songwriter Amy Allen, and Nigro produced it. “I wrote this song with Dan Nigro and Amy Allen last summer,” she wrote when it landed, “and I’m so happy it’s finally close to Christmastime so I can share it with you guys lol!” The track runs on bells and a bouncing groove, and it wears its favourite openly: it channels “Christmas Wrapping,” The Waitresses’ 1981 new-wave holiday classic. The ask in the chorus is the whole premise — not another night out, but the real commitment test. “I want you to take me home / Take me home to your parents’ house.”

The video is a family Christmas — real and imagined

The video opens in the aftermath of a wild festive party: Rodrigo wakes up next to Marshall’s character, who is, in Paste’s summary of the story, good-for-nothing. Then she imagines the better version — the one where he actually takes her home for the holidays, to dinner and drinks and family games with his parents. His mother is played by Nixon. The teaser Rodrigo shared earlier in the week sits right in that imagined house: Nixon, Marshall and Rodrigo playing a game of Heads Up around the tree, every player’s forehead card reading the same name — “Olivia Rodrigo.” Announcing the cast, Rodrigo called Nixon and Marshall her “favorite canonical red heads” and said they are “absolutely amazing in this vid.” The fantasy ends the way fantasies do: back in the real morning, Marshall is still asleep, and a disappointed Rodrigo is the one taking out the trash.

Nixon was “startled and thrilled” — and she is a fan back

The casting is less random than it looks. Rodrigo is a noted Sex and the City fan — Rolling Stone put it in the headline — and Nixon told Billboard she was “startled and thrilled” when Rodrigo asked her to star in the video. The affection runs both ways. On Watch What Happens Live on Thursday night (November 5), Nixon called Rodrigo “the kindest, loveliest, most fun person,” and explained the deeper thread: songs on Rodrigo’s previous album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, were inspired by Steve and Miranda — Nixon’s character and her on-screen husband. Being claimed by Rodrigo’s music, Nixon joked, gave her “street cred with my kids.”

One single — and a hint at something bigger

The single is Rodrigo’s first new music since her third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love, arrived in June, and since last month’s “Expectations” remix with Chappell Roan. It is out now on streaming, with exclusive seven-inch vinyl and cassette editions in stores from Friday, November 6 — the physical editions carry a B-side, “miss this christmas,” that streaming doesn’t. In the UK it drops straight into the annual Christmas No. 1 race.

And then there is the tease, which is all it is for now. Talking about the Steve-and-Miranda inspiration on Watch What Happens Live, Nixon said: “She said, not the Christmas album that’s coming out, but her previous album…” — a phrasing Paste flagged as a possible hint that a Rodrigo Christmas album is in the works. To be plain about it: Rodrigo has not announced a Christmas album, and one stray sentence on a late-night couch is not a confirmation. It is, for now, exactly the kind of thing that will keep fans reading into every word until she says more. The single, at least, needs no decoding — it’s out, it’s hers, and Christmas officially has a new voice in the race.