Long GRBs are related to the death of massive stars and reveal themselves through synchrotron emission from highly relativistic jets. The ‘Christmas Burst’ GRB 101225A was an exceptionally long GRB with a thermal afterglow, very different from the standard GRB. Initially, no spectroscopic redshift could be obtained and SED modeling yielded z=0.33. A plausible model was a He-NS star merger where the He-star had ejected part of its envelope in the common envelope phase during inspiral. The interaction between the jet and the previously ejected shell can explains the thermal emission. We obtained deep spectroscopy of the host galaxy which leads to a correction of the redshift to z=0.847. Despite the higher redshift, our model is still valid and theoretically better justified than the alternative suggestion of a blue supergiant progenitor proposed by Levan et al. (2014) for several “ultra-long” GRBs.