An Exhaustive Taxonomy of RuPaul's Christmas Albums

My friends find this to be a quirk to add onto the growing pile that's about to break the camel’s back, while my boyfriend implores that the songs are mostly unlistenable, and my editors here at PAPER hope my sonic proclivities are just kooky enough for a few clicks. I’m sort of like Jesus Christ, if the crimes he stood accused of had less to do with his messianic proclamations and more to do with the drag queen music his Apple Music Replays regularly bullied him about.

4. Slay Belles (2015)

RuPaul found herself at an interesting turning point in the mid-2010s. Gay fame was swiftly receding in the rearview mirror, while mainstream success and access to the liberal establishment hurtled towards her like the mid-size sedan her hot pink Ferrari would soon cut off on the 101. Her second Christmas album, Slay Belles, reflects this change in vibe and comes in dead last as a result. Nefarious and heartwarming and somewhat repulsive, the entire album carries the aura of those candy shops in failing middle American malls that are, without a doubt, money laundering fronts for loan sharks and the ambulance-chasing injury lawyers that keep them gainfully employed. Bite too hard on it and one might crack their teeth; indulge in it too much and they might also end up with cavities.

Theoretically, it’s a perfectly fine pop album, underneath the plasticine veneer of post-Justin Bieber and Meghan Trainor trappings. In actuality, it’s track list soars between epic highs and dreadful, almost unfathomable lows. See my track overview below:

• “Merry Christmas, Mary”: 2010s EDM Coachella pop Christmas music through the RuPaul cipher. A perfect song that makes me want to strut around the Union Square Christmas village and impress the tourists with my in-demand bag and vintage leather trench coat.
• The many, many, many, many interludes: This was the era of interludes and they're all bad. They pad the runtime in the worst way, and like most things, are emblematic of RuPaul’s inner saboteur. It whispers bad things in her ears always, specifically on this album. Things like: “Cloak your artistic endeavors in a veil of overwrought kitsch and camp, because they’re not worthy enough to stand on their own merit.”

• “Christmas Is About Love”: A B-side Drag Race girl group song that is the most easily listenable holiday music on the album. Corny but otherwise serviceable.
• “From Your Heart”: A song that could only exist in the brief window between Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” and Rihanna’s Anti.
• “You’re the Star on My Christmas Tree”: Totally worthless Meghan Trainor schlock.
• “My Favorite Holiday”: The music on a Gap commercial nobody cares to remember.
• “Christmas Cookies”: RuPaul often produces music that sounds like the introductory credits music of bad Hallmark movies about beleaguered ad executives. This is among the worst of them.
• “Jingle Dem Bells”: Big Freedia shines in spite of this banal monstrosity.
• “Nothing for Christmas”: I listen to this song every year, and then text my loved ones asking them to not let me listen to it again before I get too melancholy to function.

• “Deck the Halls ft. Todrick Hall”: No. Enough.
• “Brand New Year”: This is the RuPaul Christmas album I have the most uneasy relationship with, because I listen to it and loathe it just the same each year. When closing track finally rolls around, I thank god for the changing season, and the chance to make a different choice in the new year. I never will, but I like having options.

3. Essential Christmas (2023) 

Had this compilation album instead been exclusively new tracks, like “Baby Doll” and “Show Me That You Festive,” it might have ranked much higher on this list. Sadly, it includes the worst of Slay Belles in addition to the best of what’s still to come higher up in this ranking. Calling it Essential Christmas doesn’t help much either, as glaringly obvious tracks are missing from the album, instead featuring such abysmal auditory forays like “You’re The Star on My Christmas Tree” and “My Favorite Holiday.” Kudos, at least, for the gussied-up rendition of “Brand New Year” and the Ariana Grande rip-off “Baby Doll.” Should one simply need to show others RuPaul’s holiday offerings, or want something more family friendly around mixed company, this is the album to start with.

• “Brand New Year (Matt Pop Edit)”: I threatened to break up with my boyfriend after he described this remix as garbage pop music. The ways in which I disagree would outpace this already overwrought taxonomy, so I’ll speak plainly: this completely evolved version of the track leans into more contemporary dance sensibilities. It is infinitely listenable, like a Tension B-side.

• “Baby Doll”: Imagine RuPaul doing Ariana Grande’s My Everything front-to-back in full drag. This song is exactly like that.
• “I Just Can’t Wait ‘Til Christmas”: A surprising deep cut to make her retrospective album, but perfect nonetheless.
• “Show Me That You Festive”: If you love “Catwalk” then you'll love this song. RuPaul's shaky pop sensibilities are on full display when she abandons the pretense of camp and considers her music worthy of existing without the usual trappings.

• “From Your Heart," “You’re The Star on My Christmas Tree," “My Favorite Holiday, and “Jingle Dem Bells”: The album's low placement exclusively hinges on her befuddling choices for interstitial tracks from the catalogue, like these two auditory jingle hells.
• “Merry Christmas, Mary” and “Hey Sis, It’s Christmas”: As bad as her taste can be at times, I’m glad to see her include the best staples in her repertoire.
• “My Favorite Holiday (Matt Pop Edit)”: Sadly, Matt Pop can't save my least favorite RuPaul track. She has what feels like hundreds, to be clear, and this is the worst of them.

2. Christmas Party (2018)

Christmas Party is RuPaul’s breeziest holiday album and therefore one of her best. Coming in second on the final ranking, “Get To You (For Christmas)” starts the album off splendidly. RuPaul sticks close to a solid contemporary pop palette over the album's seven songs. “Hey Sis, It’s Christmas” is her most-streamed Christmas song for a reason — at least if Spotify is to be believed — and the reprise later in the album only solidifies the track's lofty standing. “Christmas Queen” is a baffling track that would be right at home on the Brazilian funk side of YouTube, while “Christmas Party” is a perfectly preserved specimen of post-EDM pop filtered through Big Freedia’s bounce catalogue.

By the time it all loops back around on itself, one is left with the distinct impression that a bat mitzvah DJ in 2018 accidentally sent their decks back to 1986, where they landed in the possession of an enterprising young RuPaul Charles.

• “Get to You (For Christmas)”: I’m thankful that, in the wake of Slay Belles, RuPaul course-corrected back to real music. While taking notes throughout the last few weeks, I had to resist letting this loop more than a few times each re-listen.
• “Hey Sis, It's Christmas”: We know the song well by now, having featured prominently on RPDRUK. It’s a Nicki Minaj track filtered through RuPaul’s Drag Race producers. The pre-chorus is a diamond in the rough that slowly hardens into a fabulous monstrosity.

• “Christmas Queen”: This song song sounds like those Brazilian funk tracks that cause birds to fall out of the sky. I love when I can hear the ballroom influence in her music, here fused with enough Christmas spirit and bass to blow out a window, in addition to all the birds.
• “Super Queen (Runway Remix)”: I heard this in the club once, and if I remember correctly, immediately dropped into the splits and polished the floor with my gold-plated pussy.
• “Hey Sis (Reprise)”: The sappiest of songs on the album, which is otherwise delightfully breezy. A proclamation about children vogueing all through the house and found family. I’ll allow it, if only for the voice she affects over that delectable auto-tune.

• “Christmas Cookies 2.0”: I vastly prefer this LaToya Jackson take on the song, which sounds like the sort of thing Darienne Lake would rap over on the best RuPaul’s Drag Race season we’ll ever get while Adore Delano laughs in the background with a sad, old clown. (Oh, wait, that’s Bianca Del Rio.)
• “Christmas Party”: I love that brief period post-EDM when everything got wet and hand-clappy and organic. Reminds me of my worst, drunkest semesters in college. The song is a hilarious romp through her most adventurous pop proclivities, like the sort of thing I might hear on a TikTok video late-decade featuring Hatsune Miku and Shrek twerking with the lead character from Bee Movie.

1. Ho Ho Ho (1997)

The best RuPaul Christmas album is also the first, as it were. She struck gold, tried to strike it again, and then mined this well until her geological excavations caused longterm climate impacts that will be felt for generations to come. Sort of like fracking!

Each year, the seasonal blues hit me like those highly pressurized fluids her husband pumps into the Earth’s bedrock, threatening my structural integrity and eroding the last remaining sanity I’ve clung to for the year. It’s a time of love and loss and grief and yearning — cavities all along my heart that RuPaul’s music fits quite snugly into. Ho Ho Ho is at once a deeply nostalgic and anachronistic album, though I also find it quite timeless. Like a pair of my old Christmas pajamas — sentimental, silly even. The album opens with Dolly Parton and almost immediately transitions into a then-radical plastic surgery anthem: “All I Want For Christmas." Later, “Santa Baby” predicts the eventual rise of Countess Luann’s cabaret, while “Christmas Train” and “Christmas At My House” are raucous funk jams about partying with gay people. Towards the album's close, another Dolly Parton cover tag-teams with a celebratory remix of her anthemic B-side “Celebrate” to close out my favorite holiday romp. Were I in charge of things around here, we’d have put this alongside Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas in the North Pole’s Christmas music pantheon decades ago.

• “With Bells On feat. Michelle Visage”: Her first Dolly Parton cover in the discography, and also the funniest. Michelle’s affected country accent is riotous in modern times, although those old strings still soar. (Apologies for the alliteration. It felt appropriate, considering RuPaul’s lyrical sensibilities.)
• “All I Want for Christmas”: An incredible plastic surgery anthem that supersedes my previous critiques about her over-reliance on camp later in her career.
• “Santa Baby”: Imagine Luann de Lesseps did a Christmas cabaret album live about fucking trade but she sang it all with a cigarette in her mouth.

• “All Alone on Christmas”: A spectacular Darlene Love cover that sounds like the opening credits of a Lifetime movie about a beleaguered marketing exec who's about to discover her love for Christmas crafting and single fathers.
• “Christmas Train”: I’ve been shaking my ass to those backup vocals all week. “EVERYBODY JOIN THE JAM!” This is SoulCycle music for the aforementioned beleaguered marketing exec before she quits her job and drives to Vermont.
• “Christmas Nite”: As a recovering evangelical kid, this song makes me nostalgic for a church experience that only existed in the fantasies of the people around me.
• “Christmas At My House”: The best song on the album. It’s instrumentation reminds me of things like SS Tricky, or the Bayonetta soundtrack, or the theme song of Sonic Adventure Battle 2.
• “I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus”: I’ve ignored other, more predictable covers in these track listings, but Ru’s rendition of this Christmas class is yet another pristine Countess Luann song. Where her later catalogue might lean towards Hallmark movie schmaltziness, this could be right at home on the soundtracks of golden era holiday romcoms, like Last Holiday.

• “Hard Candy Christmas”: RuPaul loves to cover Dolly Parton Christmas songs about as much as I love Dolly Parton Christmas songs. Something about Michelle and RuPaul's magnetic chemistry totally revolutionizes it, standing as a testament to their enduring love and creative partnership.
• “Celebrate (New Year’s Remix)”: “Celebrate” is likewise one of my favorite RuPaul songs, and this remix of it is quintessential ‘90s house music with the lyricism and vocalizations one might expect from the genre. A particular favorite line? "We’ll feel the glow of love under the sun" or “It's a funky situation baby/ come and feel my energy."

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