When you were a kid, it seemed like all of your favorite pop stars released holiday albums. Mariah Carey gave us the epic Merry Christmas in 1994. In 1997, Hanson dropped Snowed In. By 1998, we had *NSYNC’s Home for Christmas. Most of the major artists at the time — Christina Aguilera, Destiny’s Child, Jewel, Ashanti, Whitney Houston, 98 Degrees — also made contributions to the onslaught of yuletide tunes in the ‘90s and early ‘00s.But what once seemed de rigueur for pop artists has fallen out of fashion. In the past few years, we’ve seen just a handful of holiday albums. (Here’s looking at you, Ariana Grande, Sara Bareilles, and Justin Bieber.) In 2015, we have Kylie Minogue’s Kylie Christmas and Train’s Christmas in Tahoe — which was released exclusively on Amazon . Major artists like Adele, Sam Smith, and Demi Lovato are not celebrating the season with new albums — nor do they seem to have any solid plans to do so.What gives, pop stars? Have you all become Scrooges?Alex Gale, senior editor for Billboard , told me that 2015 is “definitely a slow year” when it comes to the holiday album. He chalks it up to something of a growing pain in pop music. “We’re at a transitional period with a lot of new, young talent,” he said. “It’s too soon in some of their careers to do that," he continued, without clarifying which stars might not be ready yet. But, he also explained, “In some ways, it’s an album cycle thing and somewhat coincidental.” In other words, maybe we're just a few years away from the next crop of pop Christmas collections. He anticipates that the artists we discussed — Adele, Katy Perry, Demi Lovato — will one day release festive records. Now’s just not the right time. “Christmas albums, almost by nature, are sort of what you would call adult contemporary,” he said. And, when it comes down to it, “It’s just not as cool as it was at one point.”