Elizabeth Chan

With a voice both warm and luminous, songwriter Elizabeth Chan focuses her work on freshly composed Christmas and holiday material. After her first album, Everyday Holidays, appeared in 2013, several tracks such as “Fa La La” from that year and “Best Gift Ever” from 2018 climbed into the upper half of Billboard’s adult contemporary chart. The more autobiographical seventh album, If the Fates Allow, arrived in 2019, while The Queen of Christmas in 2021 wove spoken-word passages together with songs to recount her personal history. Written and tracked alongside her daughter Noelle, the Songs from Noelle EP surfaced in 2023, and Shatterproof followed as an EP in 2024.

Born in New York City, Chan secured a recording contract while still in her teens, yet she built a career in media when the music path stalled. Longing to write and perform again, she issued the five-song holiday EP Naughty & Nice on her own in 2012. She subsequently established Merry Bright Music Enterprises and delivered Everyday Holidays in full-length form that October. Before the year ended, “Fa La La” climbed to number seven on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. Christmas in the City, a seven-song set, came next in 2014; its title song later returned on the twelve-track Red and Green in October 2015 and reached the chart’s top thirty. Five Golden Rings appeared a year afterward, mixing covers with new holiday songs and adding a Spanish-language version of “Fa La La.”

Chan kept issuing original material each year, releasing Songs for Noelle in 2017—an album dedicated to the daughter she was expecting while it was made—whose track “Ghosts of Christmas Past” peaked at number twelve on the adult contemporary chart. Best Gift Ever landed in time for the 2018 holiday season and saw its title song reach number eight. If the Fates Allow sustained her chart presence in 2019, as did Celebrate Me Home in 2020, which blended standards and new compositions. In 2021 she issued both the narrative album The Queen of Christmas and Greatest of These Days, a set that paired earlier hits with fresh material. The 2022 offering, 12 Months of Christmas, featured the dance-oriented single “Merry Merry.”

When an injury slowed work on a 2023 project, her daughter contributed to the recordings; Songs from Noelle emerged that October and contained a cover of “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” performed by the six-year-old. Shatterproof, an EP that includes a Thanksgiving song, was released toward the end of 2024.