Early in Taylor Swift’s career, one of her first releases was the 2007 EP The Taylor Swift Christmas Collection, which featured Swift performing covers of classic holiday songs and a pair of originals. Now, all these years later, Swift is back with a new holiday tune called “Christmas Tree Farm,” the video for which features adorable home videos of Swift from various points in her childhood.
The video contains footage of Swift and her family playing outside in the snow, writing a letter to Santa Claus, and even opening up the prophetic gift of an acoustic guitar. Swift sings on the cheery tune, “Under the mistletoe / Watchin’ the fire glow / And tellin’ me, ‘I love you’ / Just bein’ in your arms / Takes me back to that little farm / Where every wish comes true.”
Swift shared the song on Twitter, writing, “I actually did grow up on a Christmas tree farm. In a gingerbread house, deep within the yummy gummy gumdrop forest. Where, funnily enough, this song is their national anthem.”
Although that explanation makes it sound like Swift didn’t actually live on a Christmas tree farm, she really did, between the ages of 5 and 10 years old. She spoke about it in a 2014 interview with Esquire, saying, “It was such a weird place to grow up. But it has cemented in me this unnatural level of excitement about fall and then the holiday season. My friends are so sick of me talking about autumn coming. They’re like, ‘What are you, an elf?’ [My father would] tend to the farm as his hobby. He’d get up four hours early to go mow the fields on his tractor. We all had jobs. Mine was picking the praying-mantis pods off of the trees, collecting them so that the bugs wouldn’t hatch inside people’s houses.”
Watch the “Christmas Tree Farm” video above.
