Trisha Yearwood Shares Her Family’s Most Important Xmas Tradition
When both of your parents are country music superstars with busy touring schedules, it can be tricky to find time to do all of the Christmastime activities that make the holiday season special. Despite their hectic calendars, though, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood always make time for a tradition that makes it feel like Christmas in their household.
“The biggest tradition we’ve done since the girls were little is to decorate the tree together, and even though we are all in different places and the girls are grown, that is still a tradition,” Yearwood told The Boot and other outlets backstage before taping the 2019 CMA Country Christmas television special. Despite the additional logistical challenges that come with a family living in different places, she adds, they always make it work somehow.
“Our tree might get decorated at Thanksgiving, it might get decorated the day before Christmas, but that is the one thing we hold true to,” she continues. “And the girls, when they were little — I know we’re all the same way, but [there are] things your parents do when you’re a kid that you’re like, ‘Ugh, why are we doing this?’ As you get older, it becomes important to you.”
Now, in fact, Taylor, August and Allie — Brooks’ daughters with his ex-wife Sandy — are the ones keeping the tree-decorating ritual afloat. “I probably would have let the tradition go, but they’re like, ‘No, we have to decorate the tree together,'” Yearwood adds with a laugh. “So it’s something we continue to do.
“Just like in my family growing up — we just make sure that we have time to be together,” she continues. “It may not be on the day, but we make sure that, on the holidays, we have everybody in one place.”
In their professional lives, Yearwood and Brooks have come together over the holiday season, too. In 2016, they released a holiday duets album called Christmas Together, which was also their first completely collaborative album overall. It wasn’t Yearwood’s first Christmas record, but she says that working on a duets project brought something special to the album-making process.
“What I really loved is that Garth and I had kind of a different concept of a duet album, where we did a lot of duets together, but we also did songs that were just him or just me,” she explains. “So I liked that, on this album, all of that could kind of live together.”
When it comes to making a great holiday record, Yearwood says striking a good balance between tradition and individuality is key. “I like mixing traditional songs that everybody knows in with newer songs. I used to think, ‘Well, nobody wants to hear my version of “Jingle Bells,” because everybody’s done one.’ But then I realized, you kind of do want to hear everybody’s version of those songs!” she explains.
Furthermore, she adds, Brooks wrote some songs for their duets project that she thinks of as instant classics. “He wrote some songs for that album that sound to me like they’ve been around for a long time,” Yearwood notes. “I think, the more the merrier! The more new Christmas songs, the better.”
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