Let Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme Usher You Into Hell (the Holiday Season)

The most famous Christmas show in the U.S. at this point is probably Mariah Carey’s holiday spectacular—but, believe it or not, it is not even close to the campiest. That distinction goes to the Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show, created and performed by the drag stars Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme, who have been touring on their love of Christmas for eight years, creating a brand-new holiday spectacular each season (and, in 2020, an accompanying television special and soundtrack). And because they’re singers and dancers and all that jazz, each show is brimming with music, often parodies of the big songs of the year—I recommend last year’s big blowout spoof on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em.” For this year’s tour, though, they stuck to the classics and cooked up a typically wacky theme based on sci-fi and horror classics like Tales from the Crypt and Twilight Zone. (Sci-fi Christmas? I’ll take two, please.)

I videochatted with Jinkx and DeLa in October, a few months after Jinkx finished up her Broadway star turns in Oh, Mary! and Pirates! The Penzance Musical. We spoke about what to expect in this year’s holiday tour, the lack of a big unifying pop song in 2025, how Christmas songs are the last remaining musical monoculture, and how they come up with the original parody songs for their show. “Sometimes it means me coming up with a really funny idea and going, ‘This is a DeLa song,” Jinkx told me. “Or when she’s like, I think you should just sing ‘Santa Baby,’ but make it about fucking Krampus. And I’m like, ‘Thank you, DeLa. That’s all I needed. It was right in front of me and I just needed you to say it.”

Hearing Things: I’ve seen the holiday show before, and I know it changes every year, but 2025 is quite special in a hellscape kind of way. How do you intend to bring holiday cheer in this cursed year?

Jinkx: By leaning into the cursed.

Ben DeLaCreme: This question comes up every year, because every year is worse than the last one. Every year it’s like, How are you possibly gonna tackle this? How do you sing and dance and find joy through all of this? And the answer is the same, which is: you sing and dance and find joy. That’s how we keep going through it, that's how we have the energy to fight what's happening. We never shy away from what's happening in the world, but we also understand our duty to bring a safe space and a little breather for everyone, and then use that energy to continue heading where we all need to head.

I feel that. What was the process of creating the music for this year’s show?  

Jinkx: Every year, we just kind of make it up new. We follow the vibes we're getting from the zeitgeist. That’s such a vague way of answering it, but some years there is a song that is monoculturally the song of the year, so we’d be silly not to incorporate a parody of that song. However, there’s also years like this year where there's not necessarily something like that, and it’s something DeLa brought up to me on one of our first writing sessions: What are we going to do with there not being a song of the year? So we go back to the basics—which, as drag queens, we have a very esoteric and eclectic catalog of music between us and we talk about each moment and what’s the best song for this moment, either contextually or lyric-wise. Sometimes that’s a classic Christmas carol with just god-awful, absurdist lyrics that you would never imagine set to that tune—and sometimes it’s a pop song with the stupidest, sugariest, candy-coatedest Christmasy lyrics set to, you know, pop punk.

DeLa: We also have original music in the show. We have a composer we work with, Major Scales, who has been Jinkx’s musical partner since college. He’s incredible—he has composed all of our original songs, and then we work the lyrics. It’s become a really fun relationship where we know how to work together so well. I mean, one year there was a song that was literally just a poem I wrote, “Looking at the Lights,” and I was like, “Major, can you make music to this?” And we work with an incredible music producer, Markaholic, who does all of the final production that sounds so bombastic and full in these huge theaters that we’re working in.

I heard that there was a little bit of sci-fi and horror in this year’s show. Can you say more? 

DeLa: Jinkx and I have been writing together for so long, and we’ve come up with so many crazy ideas that they have to get crazier every year to top the last ones. So we wind up with all these little bits and pieces that we have to put in the vault because they don't work in the context, or they're not sustainable for 90 minutes. This year, Jinkx has been very trusting in allowing me to take on the head writer role, which is fun and challenging but also much easier because we have these things [in the vault] to pull from. I pitched the format of an anthology: Jinkx and DeLa try to do a holiday show while surviving a Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror”-style anthology—you know, Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone. We’ve mashed them all together, so for the first time we have multiple short narratives. It’s been a really fun and freeing formula to work with, because we just get to go all over the place. 

Jinkx: Yeah, with each idea that wouldn’t sustain a two-act show, we get to go as far with it as possible because it’s only got to fill out a fourth of the show. And thanks to Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis and Freakier Friday, a long-standing request of mine is being honored: DeLa and I will be portraying each other, trapped in one another’s lives. Which, every year, DeLa has very valid reasons for why we shouldn’t do it, and it’s always the same valid reason, which is: We cannot do that for 90 minutes to two hours. Tough on the pipes, you know. But for 15, 20 minutes, we can pull it off. 

There’s a long history of strong music in sci-fi like the Twilight Zone and Tales from the Crypt, as well as horror, like with John Carpenter’s theme songs. Are you pulling from any of that?

Jinkx: Absolutely, but DeLa’s number-one rule with anything we do that is not Christmas is that it has to get pushed through the Christmas lens. So I will pitch these things that are just like, You want to do that in a holiday show? Okay, but you have to change all the words to be about candy. 

One of my favorite things about creating a show from the ground up, whether it’s a show on Broadway—like, this year, I originated a role in Pirates of Penzance musical, and what was really exciting about that was we worked in a lightning-fast amount of rehearsal time, getting a lot done every single day, and everyone is like, “We’re moving so fast!” I’m like, This is how DeLa and I always work. It was affirming to see that our process is not unlike a Broadway show. There’s source material, but we’re also reinventing it as we rehearse it. 

DeLa: We have an opening that heavily references Tales from the Crypt. [The challenge was], how do you do the Tales from the Crypt version of classic Christmas scoring without leaning into Danny Elfman? How do we make something that is its own new idea? 

There is one plot that we abandoned, but it was an early pitch of mine about how the lack of monoculture in music and the division through social media that makes none of us listen to the same music, is actually a plot engineered by Santa Claus so that Christmas music will become the only monoculture. Which is kind of true, right? It’s like, we have to reference Christmas music, because that’s the music that everybody knows.

Yeah, you’re just describing reality.

Jinkx: As Americans, you can’t go grocery shopping without hearing Bing Crosby every year, or Mariah Carey. It doesn’t even matter who you are or where you come from: Christmas music infects us all. And there was no song of the summer, but I kind of love it as someone who has never really resonated with pop music. My favorite thing is when pop music gets reimagined by the genres of music that I like: I love folk covers of Britney Spears, I love post-modern jukebox big band covers of Taylor Swift, you know?

It’s interesting that this year everyone’s just kind of been leaning into their own tastes rather than worrying about what is the status quo. The status quo has been weaponized against a lot of people, so I don’t know that a lot of people resonate with whatever the status quo might be this year. 

That’s a great point.

DeLa: I have to say, I think there’s an opposite take on this, which is that the division we are experiencing culturally is represented through music, the way that we are all fed different ideas and social media becomes this vortex. The algorithm is really insidious and I think sadly the music industry reflects that right now. Like, the song of the summer was Jet2holiday, you know. [laughs]

You can look at it as people leaning into what they like and not worrying about what other people are interested in. Or you can look at it as, we are being marketed away from one another because it's easier to influence small groups than large, broad groups. We’re at this crazy time where music is both a weapon and our form of expression—and that’s kind of always been the truth. 

That said, there is something about queer culture specifically, where really timeless music  endures through our culture. The way that queer people identify with certain music and carry it on, there is sort of a thing where it’s like, okay, well, we might not have like our song of the summer this year, but we do have a certain monoculture [of our own] that’s a little bit smaller.

As much as I was like, “What is the music this year?” there was a series of chart-toppers that really endured this year that I dismissed for a long time. I finally forced myself to watch K-Pop Demon Hunters, and I was won over really quick. I was like, okay, yeah, there’s a little monoculture here.

Jinkx: As for me, I have consumed zero new media except for horror films. I can’t tell you what the Top 40 songs are—but I can hum you the opening theme song for Weapons.

The Jinkx and DeLa Holiday Show tour begins November 12 in Charlotte, NC; all dates are here.