Behold “Christmas Woman”—topping the list of Sufjan’s most Illinois-y sounding Christmas songs like a sparkling ornament. And its shared vibe with that landmark album is a great thing. Because the grim yet achingly transcendent landscape of Illinois deserves Christmas, too. But despite aural similarities, “Christmas Woman” arrived two full years after Illinois—to a world where the woodwinds and metaphors are a tad more psychedelic, as if someone dosed the Yule log. Two years are all that separated A Hard Day’s Night and Revolver, after all, and it’s kind of fun to speculate what transformations those two spins around the snow globe held for our Advent hero.

Sufjan of the mid-2000s had a lot to grapple with come Christmastime: newfound outsider-art infamy, consumerism, Christian hypocrisy, and all the other delicate tropes that had by then already fallen under his mastery. With his actual beliefs obscured in abstruse poetics (thank God), I can never claim to know exactly what his Biblical allegories are spelling out, but they’re captivating nonetheless.

Snakeskins and panthers and babies floating on frozen rivers. Is this Moses in the reeds? Is “the tipping of the handlers as the pagans must” evoking a connection between holiday excess and New Testament moneylenders in the temple? I don’t know! But maybe it doesn’t matter.

It’s not unusual to hear Sufjan entreat Christians to chill out, or do better, or, simply, “put away your fuss.” And that self-awareness is charming as hell. He says that for a century, they have been “scrambling to assemble what a man believes.” I gotta believe it’s been even longer than that. But perhaps Christmas is the best time for such an activity. To self-assess. To give some form of belief another half-chance. To plumb forgotten depths of one’s self for dusty magic, feeling for that final M&M at the bottom of the stocking—even for atheists who enjoy Sufjan simply for his overabundant, Christmas-morning-esque bounty of aesthetic and melodic gifts to all.

Because even though Jesus might be the reason for the season, Sufjan Stevens—and galloping marvels of kaleidoscopic festiveness like “Christmas Woman”—is the gift that keeps on giving.