Fans tuning in to watch the CMA Country Christmas special tonight will get a treat from the Pistol Annies, as they perform their new original Christmas tune, “Snow Globe.”

The festive track, co-written by band mates Miranda Lambert, Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe, is a stand-out from their new Christmas album, Hell of a Holiday. But it almost didn’t make it onto the track list, the band mates reveal. They wrote “Snow Globe” just under the wire, while already in the studio recording their Christmas project.

“I think it was the saxophone solo of ‘Come on Christmas Time.’ It started, and I started spinning, and I was like, ‘I feel like I’m spinning around in a snow globe.’ I said it to Miranda, and she said, ‘Oh, we should have written ‘Snow Globe,’” the band mates recall. “We were like, ‘Well, it’s not too late. Why can’t we? We’re still recording the record, technically.’”

They wrote the song right then and there, while their studio musicians were at lunch, and the songwriting process only took about 20 minutes, the Annies explain.

“We just wrote about all the things you would see in a snow globe,” they continue. “With the little white church, and the little red truck, and picking out a tree…”

Aside from those classic Christmas scenes, the Annies also took inspiration from something a little less traditional, too.

“Cracker Barrel! We talked about Cracker Barrel a lot while we were writing that song. We thought about how they deck it out for Christmas,” they add with a laugh.

CMA Country Christmas airs tonight at 8 p.m. EST on ABC.

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