fruitcake

fruitcake is Sabrina Carpenter's six-track holiday EP, released November 17, 2023, via Island Records. It was her first Christmas-themed project and something she had wanted to make for years, only to keep missing the seasonal window. When she finally delivered it, the result was a tightly sequenced collection that balanced modern holiday wit with genuine sentiment.^[1]

Produced by Julian Bunetta and John Ryan, the EP moves through six moods: the viral playfulness of "A Nonsense Christmas," the frank romanticism of "buy me presents," the quietly devastating "santa doesn't know you like i do," the melancholy character sketch of "cindy lou who," the holiday-fatigue anthem "is it new years yet?," and the doo-wop cover "white xmas" as a closing exhale. Critics praised the arc as purposeful, with the Harvard Crimson calling it "a very bite-sized but worthy holiday album" with a clear emotional progression.^[2]

The EP's commercial life unfolded in two phases. At its 2023 release, it arrived during Carpenter's momentum-building period as the opening act for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour, earning warm critical notices but modest chart performance. A second wave came after Carpenter's Netflix holiday special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter in December 2024, which drove the EP up 27,000 percent in streaming activity and pushed it to the top 10 of the Billboard 200.^[1]