Dolly Parton Celebrates Christmas With Her Family by Dressing Up as ‘Granny Claus’

Dolly Parton has a large extended family, which includes several brothers and sisters as well as nieces and nephews. One of the family’s holiday traditions is a cookie night, though Parton herself doesn’t exactly attend — but “Granny Claus” does. “I dress up like Santa, I’ve got my elevator decorated like a chimney,” she told the Tennessean.

Parton shared that she brings the children in her family to her home every December, where they bake cookies together and open gifts. “I come down in my Santa suit with my bag of toys,” she said. “They’re sittin’ at the bottom, waiting for the elevator to come down. That’s been going on for years and years.” This year, cookie night will likely not proceed as usual, though Parton has been spreading the Christmas spirit in a myriad of other ways including her album A Holly Dolly Christmas, her Netflix movie Christmas on the Square and numerous television performances and specials.

“Even with as bad as things have been during the COVID, I’ve been very productive,” she said. “I feel like I’m doing things to try to uplift people. [Doing] things to bring a little light into the darkness. That’s kind of my purpose in life. Hopefully I’m getting it done.”

She also helped fund the Moderna coronavirus vaccine with a $1 million donation to Vanderbilt University for research into a cure for COVID-19, which she found out about shortly before an interview with Hoda Kotb and Jenna Bush Hager on the Today show. “I’m just happy that anything I do can help somebody else, and when I donated the money to the Covid fund, I just wanted it to do good,” Parton told the hosts. “Evidently, it is. Let’s just hope we find a cure real soon.”

The singer added to BBC’s The One Show that she felt “very honored and very proud” to be a small part of something that could aid in ending the pandemic. “I just felt so proud to have been part of that little seed money that will hopefully grow into something great and help to heal this world,” she said. “I’m a very proud girl today to know I had anything at all to do with something that’s going to help us through this crazy pandemic.”