Meaghan Smith Is Wishing for a 'Christmas Kiss' This Holiday Season

On stage at the Rivoli, a tiny club on Toronto's hip Queen St. strip, Halifax, NS, singer-songwriter Meaghan Smith does her best to inject Yuletide spirit into a room full of big-city hipsters. With only a single guitarist as accompaniment, Smith -- looking more Zooey Deschanel than Mrs. Claus in her high black boots and vintage lace dress -- serves up modern renditions of holiday classic and self-penned contemporary Christmas tunes from her latest release, 'It Snowed.'

Smith's 2010 debut, 'The Crickets Orchestra,' won accolades from old-time jazz aficionados and electro-pop fans alike, and helped her snag a Juno Award for Best New Artist. A holiday-themed record might seem like a strange follow-up, but if you love the holidays as much as Smith, it's a no-brainer.

"I try not to be annoying, but I'm one of those people that start thinking about Christmas in January," she tells Spinner.

'It Snowed' features contemporary renditions of holiday classics such as 'Silent Night,' 'Christmas Time Is Here,' and 'Silver Bells,' but the record's highlight is a revamped take on the pop standard 'Baby It's Cold Outside' featuring Toronto rapper Buck 65.

Traditionally, the beloved duet has the male character using inclement weather as a tool of seduction. This time, Smith flipped the script. Now she's the one doing the wooing.

"It was written in the '40s and I don't think they had the same issues with date rape," she explains. "I had to switch it up to feel comfortable performing it."

Smith comes from a musical family, her mother teaches piano and her father plays bass. Holidays at the Smith house are always a musical affair.

"At Christmas, we'd spend a lot of time standing around the piano, like a Norman Rockwell painting, singing Christmas Carols."

It's with reverence for those time-honored carols that she offers her own compositions to the Holiday canon.

Her album's original tracks include 'It Snowed,' a song previously recorded for the benefit album 'A New Kind of Light' -- also featuring indie crooner Jill Barber -- that helped raise a million dollars for food banks in Nova Scotia, and 'Christmas Kiss,' in which she tells her lover what she really wants to unwrap under the tree.

"We don't need to buy each other anything. Why don't we just make out and spend time together? It sounds tacky, but that's all I want," she says of the playful song.

Now you can't argue with that.