Newcomer Josh Ross has had a helluva 2023 with signing with UMG Nashville, releasing new songs, hitting the road with Nickelback, Bailey Zimmerman and many other shows. Since he’s been touring so much this year, he’s barely spent any time at home with his family back in Canada, so he’s looking forward to having several days with his family.

“This year’s been a really exciting year with touring and releasing new music and being on the road,” says Josh. “I haven’t really got to spend a lot of days at home especially in a row, so I get to go home home, which will be Ontario, Canada, and spend time with Mom, Dad, grandparents, brother and sisters and nieces and nephews and just kind of catch up on all of the things that I kind of got to miss this year. Luckily, I have Facetime and stuff like that, but actually being there with them is going to be great.”

Josh says one of the main things that would get him in the Christmas spirit growing up was cutting down the family Christmas tree. “The thing for me that would always solidify that Christmas is happening is we’d go and cut a tree down,” he says. “So, my mom, dad, myself and we used to take the dog that I had as a child, we’d all go out and cut a tree down, and that’s just like a Canadian thing. I think here we import the Northern trees, so the ornaments stay on them, but up there that’s what we got to do, so that’s something I’ll always remember as a kid year after year would get me in the spirit.”

One year, he was all into asking Santa for a PlayStation 2, but the fact was, he was never truly into playing video games, but he’d rather be playing outdoors. “All my friends had video games, and I was never very, very big into video games,” he says. “I was more like the go outside and play type, and honestly, this is really what speaks to me as a person now with different things in life, but I really wanted a PlayStation 2 and I remember like that was the big thing that I wanted. And I got a PlayStation 2, and I bet you I only played it for like a couple of weeks and then I was back to outside playing, and really just wasn’t super interested in it. I think that kind of still speaks to me today is I’d much rather be in the outdoors and not necessarily in front of a screen.”

One of Josh’s favorite holiday memories is when his older sister would come home from college. “So, my sister is 12 years older than myself, so she moved out West to go to school when I was like six-years-old,” he says. “She used to always come home during Christmas. I never knew when because I was young and didn’t really understand how the calendar worked, but I always remembered that my sister would fly home and come wake me up and like would always surprise me. So, that’s definitely one of my favorite Christmas memories is when my sister would come home from out West.”

Josh hasn’t watched a lot of Christmas movies, since he’s mostly a guy who likes to spend his time outdoors or on the road. However, he did finally watch the classic Elf all the way through for the first time this past week. “We were talking about Christmas movies, and I think I said I watched Elf all the way through. Now I understand what the World’s Best Coffee Shop means and all this kind of stuff and people have all these jokes around Christmas time.”

He has watched The Grinch several times, and in fact, it was one of his favorite movies growing up. There’s a little twist–he has a pretty cool connection to the film’s main star, actor Jim Carrey. He recently revealed that “fun fact,” and the reactions were priceless. “It’s funny, The Grinch was one of my favorite movies, and that was one that I watched, and I got to fill people in, I was like, ‘Well, my mom used to date ‘The Grinch.’’ And everybody was like, ‘Wait! What do you mean?’ And my mom’s boyfriend in high school was Jim Carrey. So, it’s kind of a cool, I guess, fun fact that most people would not know is he grew up in Burlington, Ontario and went to Aldershot High School, and he was my mom’s ninth grade, or freshman year, boyfriend.”

Josh will kick off his headlining trek, The Trouble Tour, on January 12th in Winnipeg, Canada and will continue throughout the year, interspersed between dates on the Bailey Zimmerman Religiously The Tour.