AceShowbiz - Dolly Parton waited to gift fans with a new holiday album because her first festive offering with her late friend Kenny Rogers remains a popular pick 36 years on.

The country superstar teamed up with Rogers for 1984's "Once Upon a Christmas", and it took her another six years before her second holiday offering, "Home for Christmas", hit retailers.

She is currently riding high on the success of her third seasonal release, "A Holly Dolly Christmas", which dropped last month, but Dolly insists she wouldn't have left such a long gap between releases if her Rogers project hadn't been so "hot."

"The reason I hadn't done anything in 30 years is (because) Kenny Rogers, the album we did, still plays every Christmas, it's still very hot," Dolly explained on U.S. breakfast show "Today".

"A Holly Dolly Christmas" features a string of collaborations with the likes of her goddaughter Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray Cyrus, Michael Buble, Jimmy Fallon and her brother Randy Parton, but Dolly didn't set out to create a star-studded duets disc.

"I just wanted to do one on my own, but it turns out that I just brought all these other people to get involved in it as well," she smiled.

And the coronavirus shutdown proved to be a creatively fruitful period for Parton and her pals.

She shared, "It was a good time because everybody was kinda shut down, and I thought, 'Well, this is the perfect time to write some new music, to get in (the studio) and safely do it and send out all the stuff (music) to other people (when) we couldn't get in the studio together, like we normally do, but this day and time, the new technology, that's kinda how people are making records anyway.' "

"So we pulled it off, with all these great artists... I'm just really proud to have... all kinds of friends and family on there. It turned out really well."