You should forgive Ariana Grande if you’re on her Christmas list and your present doesn’t come exactly on time, or wrapped like you might expect. She’s, you know, kind of busy still promoting Wicked: For Good and her return to Saturday Night Live this weekend for the fifth time with musical guest Cher. But she did take time out on Thursday night (Dec. 18) to chat with Seth Meyers for the first time on Late Night, where she explained what kind of Christmas person she is while also revealing the one Wicked tie-in item that kind of gives her the willies.
Asked if she manages to buy gifts for everyone on her list amid her busy schedule, Grande said she tried to get as much of her shopping done as possible before the brutal scheduled of her SNL week. “I’ve been managing to wrap some of the gifts in the morning before I leave for SNL, and then when I get home I’m usually too tired,” said Grande.
Meyers, who thanked Grande for showing up in exactly the kind of outfit he’d expect from good witch Glinda, a long, gauzy princess dress fit for a ball, wondered if she had magical wrapping skills as well.
“I think it looks… well-intentioned,” Grande admitted of her gift wrapping skills. “I think it’s the thought that counts. And I do feel guilty about the amount of tape used. That’s gotta be bad, but I make up for it in other ways… It’s hideous, but it’s with love.”
As for her favorite Christmas tradition, Grande paid homage to her beloved Nonna — who died in June at 99 years old — revealing that her go-to holiday activity was baking traditional Italian Zeppole donut-like treats with her late grandma. “My mission this year is to come up with a plant-based Zeppole. She would not like that, maybe I won’t actually.”
After talking about the emotionally taxing filming of the Wicked movies and how the role of Glinda came at the perfect time in her career, Meyers asked Grande to pivot to the mountain of Wicked tie-in merchandise that many boys and girls (and men and women) will likely find under their trees this year. “Was there a particular piece of merch that you were most covetous of when you saw it?,” he wondered.
“First of all, my mom has everything,” Grande said. “She went a little too hard. And I was like, ‘Mom, it’s okay, Universal, they’re gonna send it, it’s okay!’ And then she’d be like, ‘No, no, no, no, I need, like, 30!” Grande said a few of the items, though, were “a little disturbing. Like the pink and green — I hope this is okay to say — the pink and green, was it mac and cheese that they did?”
“Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that’s disturbing,” Meyers assured Grande.
“That was when I knew, ‘Oh, this is big!’,” Grande said. “It’s a little bigger than I thought.”
Grande also revealed that she had just been introduced to this weekend’s musical guest on SNL, Cher, who she had not met until they filmed the promos for the show earlier this week. “I mean, she’s just the one and only. It was so spectacular. And she’s just brilliant and I’m so excited,” Grande said of the music icon who will be marking her return to the sketch show for the first time in nearly 40 years this weekend.
Watch Grande on Late Night below.
