After he is arrested, the woman runs away from her husband's family, changes her name, and finds work as a singer in a New Orleans dive.

On Christmas Eve in New Orleans, U.S. Army officer Charlie Mason meets beautiful Maison Lafitte hostess "Jackie" (whose real name is Abigail Manette).

Meanwhile, Robert escapes from jail and comes to see Abigail, but he is shot by police and dies in her arms, leaving her to start again.

[6] Walter Wanger wanted to turn it into a film in 1939,[2] but the Hays Office rejected his proposal, as they felt the novel's story about an Englishman meeting a beautiful Russian prostitute was too sordid.

[8] Durbin, usually the girl next door in Universal Pictures musicals, plays a naif who falls for him and sticks with him even knowing he's a killer.

A week later the writer walked into Jackson's office and said "Felix, don't you think Herman Mankiewicz drunk is still better than Dwight Taylor sober?"

Universal loaned Turhan Bey to MGM in exchange for Gene Kelly who played her husband.

[15] The director was Robert Siodmak who said the film had "a good plot (though the studio always wanted to change my psychological endings into physical ones, when the Hays office didn't intervene...) and interesting casting Gene Kelly in such a way as to suggest a sinister quality behind a rather superficial charm.

[18] Durbin performs two musical numbers in Christmas Holiday: "Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year" written for the film by Frank Loesser, and also the Irving Berlin ballad "Always".

The film also features excerpts from Tristan und Isolde ("Liebestod") by Richard Wagner, "Silent Night, Holy Night" by Franz Xaver Gruber, and Latin chant for the Midnight Mass scene (which was footage of an actual Tridentine Mass at the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana).

[20] In his review for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther called the story "the oldest sort of hat—the kind of dramatic farrago that was being played by faded stars ten years ago.

"[21] Crowther wrote that it was "really grotesque and outlandish what they've done to Miss Durbin in this film"—forced to play a role that is "a figment within a moody and hackneyed yarn.

[21]Crowther is no more charitable towards Gene Kelly, who "performs her no good husband in his breezy, attractive style, which is thoroughly confusing, considering the character that he is supposed to be.