Hilary Duff to Release Holiday EP Holiday Things This Friday

A holiday EP is usually a small gesture. It gets made quickly, released in December, and forgotten by January. Hilary Duff’s arrives at an unusual moment, though: in the middle of the most active period of her music career since the mid-2000s, and with a title that suggests she knows exactly what she is doing.

Holiday Things is out this Friday and runs five tracks. Three are originals: “I Guess It’s Christmas,” “All You Want for Christmas Is Me,” and “I Want (A Few Small Things).” The other two are familiar. Duff rerecorded “Last Christmas,” retitled here as “Last Christmas (Mine),” and closes the EP with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

That rerecording is the interesting part. “Last Christmas” first appeared on Santa Claus Lane, the holiday album Duff released in October 2002. Last week the record turned twenty-four, and Duff marked the anniversary on Instagram with its cover art and a question about doing it all again. The EP is the answer, and the parenthetical in “Last Christmas (Mine)” reads like a claim on a song she has been singing since she was a teenager.

The timing is not incidental. Luck … or Something, her first album in over a decade, was made with her husband and collaborator Matthew Koma, and she has been touring behind it, with North American dates already announced for 2027. Earlier this month came “CATastrophe,” from The Cat in the Hat soundtrack. In December she plays Jingle Ball 2026.

Holiday music is one of the few spaces where a pop artist can revise her earlier self without much risk. Duff is using it to close a loop rather than open a nostalgia booth.