This was the holiday party we needed, a treasure under the Rockefeller tree. Saturday Night Live welcomed Kate McKinnon back into its bosom this week, for her first hosting gig after her 10-year tenure as cast favorite. She looked positively verklempt up there at the start of her monologue, pleasingly herky jerky with her body as she stammered about how little she liked talking in her regular voice. “Ever since I left this job, because my skin was reacting poorly to the prosthetics, I’ve been trying to assemble a human personality,” she explained. “So far, I have a hat.” 

She showed us old photos of her in her junior prom renaissance fair dress and looking like a Grey’s Anatomy first-year resident on her old NBC badge. Lorne Michaels demanded she sing, so she sidled up to a tiny piano, crooning out the wistful opening lines of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Well, Christmas came early, because she was soon flanked by dream Supremes Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig—wearing natty sequins to her black tux—who joined her in caroling the tune: “We came home for Christmas, it’s time to start the show.”

And truly, the best show of the year it was. The highlight of a very high evening was “Tampon Farm,” in which McKinnon strapped on a guitar and a shag wig and sang about a “utopia of women” where lesbians grow tampons in corn stalks and cabbage heads, and shake them loose from the trees. All the SNL women out there working the fiber fields, plus Wiig, Rudolph, musical guest Billie Eilish, and the original bad news bear Paula Pell. May Tampon Farm eventually find its way to the Broadway stage.

Speaking of Eilish, she was introduced by McKinnon and her weird Barbie director Greta Gerwig, who held onto each other like sisters. The young musician appeared on stage under her first name blown up in Barbie font, with her brother and music partner Finneas on the piano. She sang “What was I Made For,” the potent ode to the patience that self-discovery demands, and the central existential question that grounds the pink fantasy of a movie. 

A montage of girlhood, of beaming babies, robust middle-aged women, and fading grandmothers, played to moving effect in Gerwig’s film as Barbie must decide between her synthetic life and a messy real one. Here that montage was swapped out with footage of SNL’s female cast members, showing them as infants and fully alive women. It was lovely, as was Eilish’s later performance of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” accompanied by fat fluffs of snow falling from the stage lights.

The hits kept coming. Bowen Yang joined McKinnon, Wiig and Rudolph to play the members of ABBA, promoting their new Christmas album. The band had remade their hit “Chiquitita” into “Frostytita,” and Wiig broke delightfully while singing with her nose smushed against Rudolph’s. In “Fa La La,” the band sang in their trademark style of “standing close, singing in different directions,” and I realized what a gift it was to see Rudolph yelling syncopated notes into the side of Wiig’s face.

McKinnon was in nearly every sketch, clearly delighted to be back at the party for a bit. She was a Scottish elf barfing up Skittles after witnessing a killer whale attack in the North Pole; an anxious mother in cardinal holiday sweater, insisting before her daughters—played by Chloe Fineman and **Molly Kearney—**could unwrap their presents that they would hate them, that she had the receipts, that she didn’t know what she was thinking, and wouldn’t one of them hit her already for her terrible failings.

The show sang through the final sketch, in which this notorious cat lady got to work with a box full of them. She and Eilish were the proud team behind Whiskers ‘R We, in which they tried to press folks to adopt various grumpy cats. “That trademark mole on her face?” McKinnon said, pointing at one of their patient feline co-stars. “That’s a deer tick.” Of an orange tom cat she said, in what one imagines was a nod Barbie’s summer double feature buddy: “This one’s name is Oppenheimer. When he runs away from his litter box, you know he dropped the biggest bomb of all time.” Hoorah for Eilish, who valiantly pushed through a mouthful of fur and a squeaking guinea pig.

There was some nasty fun at Weekend Update as well, especially as the bros roasted each other in their annual tradition of writing each other jokes to read sight unseen, but I’m not going to include them here. Their sharp snickers aren’t what’ll linger in the memory before the show returns next year. It’ll be the power of tampons, and that squadron of women who started and ended the show—delighted to be in each other’s excellent company.