Baumgartner also shared holiday episode memories with ‘Office Ladies’ hosts Angela Kinsey and Jenna Fischer

The success of The Office was something of a Christmas miracle — at least according to Brian Baumgartner.

The actor and author of The Night Before Christmas at Dunder Mifflin joined fellow Office alumni Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey on a special holiday bonus episode of their podcast Office Ladies this week to share memories of the hit NBC sitcom’s yuletide episodes.

Baumgartner, who played lovable doofus Kevin Malone on the NBC sitcom from 2005 to 2013, said that his memories of the show’s holiday episodes have a lot to do with what was going on “outside” of the world of The Office.

“It’s about what was happening outside. And as I’m sure you guys have or will talk about, like, that very first Christmas episode,” Baumgartner told Fischer and Kinsey. “It didn’t launch the show. It wasn’t the first episode of the show. But that episode really launched the success of the show.”

“That episode became our largest audience since the premiere,” he continued of the season 2 episode, “Christmas Party.” “And from there, you know, then Steve [Carell] wins the Golden Globe, like, three or four weeks later, everything starts happening.”

“We turned a corner,” Kinsey chimed in.

“You know, at that point, we didn’t even have a full order for the season. And they started — after that, it became clear we were gonna be around for a while.”

Both Baumgartner and Kinsey have talked previously about what the 2005 episode, which drew 10 million viewers, meant for the series. “After that episode aired, we were the No. 1 streaming show on iTunes and all of a sudden we were like, ‘Hold up. We found our audience,’ ” Kinsey told Yahoo Entertainment in 2022.

But, Baumgartner said on Office Ladies, the episode was special in other ways. “Everybody did something,” he said. “Everyone was sort of featured in some way.”

“They were hard to produce, the Christmas episodes,” he continued, “because: big party, group scenes, everybody involved.

Fischer, meanwhile, remembered the holiday episodes as some of the most “joyous” to make. “We really would be in these, like, group party situations for most of the episode.”

“I’m sure we were very hard to wrangle,” she added. “We were probably, like, trying to make a TV show with a room full of 6-year-olds or something, doing all our bits.”

The trio recalled one unruly scene in 2009’s “Secret Santa” when Carell’s Michael Scott dressed up as Santa and had Baumgartner’s Kevin sit on his lap. Fischer said that none of the cast could get through the scene without laughing.

“If you watch that episode, people are breaking in the background,” Fischer said. “We never, ever got a take where people held it together the whole time long enough to actually put the show together. I think they just gave up. They were like, ‘Forget it. This is what it is.’ ”