When Nashville producer Owen Bradley asked Loretta Lynn to write a Christmas song for her first Christmas album, mostly a collection of holiday standards, she laughed. "Where I came from there wasn't much of a Christmas, we were too poor," she recalled in the book Honky Tonk Girl: My Life In Lyrics. "I told him how we didn't have money for Christmas, but how Daddy would go cut us a cedar tree and Mommy and us kids would pop popcorn and thread it on a string to hang on the tree and how we would all sing songs together. Those memories got me thinkin', so one Christmas I went home and wrote 'Country Christmas' that night and recorded it the next day."

Lynn wrote two other songs for the album: "It Won't Seem Like Christmas" and "To Heck With Ole Santa Claus."

Lynn waited 50 years to release her next Christmas album, White Christmas Blue. The collection featured new recordings of many tunes from the 1966 album, including this tune, which was released as a single for the first time.