All I Want for Christmas Is You

Few things signify the start of the festive season quite like the sparkling 13 opening notes of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’. Evoking the festive nostalgia of a music box or musical snow globe, the tinkling percussion leads into Carey’s acapella-style intro, before the audio wonderland bursts into a majestic cacophony of chimes, sleigh bells and sweeping strings. Originally released on Carey’s 1994 album Merry Christmas, the song reached No.3 in Ireland, and the top spot in over 20 countries and has charted every holiday season since. With estimated sales of over 16 million worldwide, it’s since become the first and only Christmas song to take home the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) Diamond Award, in recognition of 10 million sales and streaming units in the United States, crowning Mariah as the ‘Queen Of Christmas’. It was Mariah Carey’s Irish-American mother who inspired her love of all things festive, and so the track has a special place in the Great Irish Songbook.

The Story Behind The Song

Mariah Carey was just 21 years old when her eponymous debut album was released by Columbia Records, in June 1990. ‘Vision of Love’ was the first single released from the album and the response was seismic. After nine weeks the track hit No.1 on the US Billboard charts and it also topped the charts in Canada. Featuring a powerhouse vocal performance, showcasing the use of ‘melisma’ for which Carey would become famous, it was nominated for three Grammy Awards, delivering Carey’s first silverware for Best Female Vocal Performance. That win – and a stunning live performance on the Grammy show – catapulted the album to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, almost nine months after its release. It stayed there for eleven weeks, going on to be certified nine times platinum. It was, you might say, a hell of a fine start to her young career.

Her second album, Emotions (1991) didn’t fare quite so spectacularly (it ‘only’ went four times platinum), but the follow-up Music Box (1993) became her biggest ever, selling a whopping 28 million copies. Powered by a chart-topping single ‘Dreamlover’, it was a global No.1, selling over 10 million copies in the US alone, also hitting the bullseye across Europe.

When it came to writing and recording her fourth LP – a Christmas album, of all things – in the summer of 1994, Mariah transformed her rented Hamptons house into a winter wonderland, complete with Christmas tree and festive ornaments to add authenticity and emotion to the August recording. It famously took Carey and writing partner Walter Afanasieff just 15 minutes to compose ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’, nailing the nucleus of the song while jamming some rock ‘n’ roll and blues on the piano. The up-tempo 60s-inspired song fused pop, soul, R&B, gospel and dance-pop influences, but was essentially simple and well-crafted. Ironically, given that Carey wrote it while surrounded by the trappings of Christmas, the song was a rejection of the material side of the holidays – “the trees, snow and presents” – in favour of the enduring power of love.

A classic '90s publicity still of Mariah Carey, shot by Deborah Feingold

Carey added the soulful melody with the opening line “I don’t want a lot for Christmas…” She tweaked and developed the lyrics over the next week, calling Afanasieff from her festive-filled home to embellish the harmonies. The track was recorded in New York. Afanasieff originally laid Carey’s voice over a live band, but that was dumped as he constructed his own arrangement of programmed instrumentation, including piano, effects, drums and triangle, riding on a rhythmic beat that has been compared to the “loping pace of a horse or reindeer.” It was pop history in the making. ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ went on to become one of the best-selling singles of all time and the only holiday song to achieve Diamond status – a remarkable milestone forever etched in the annals of pop music.

Maria Carey: a consummate live performer

Carey’s affinity with the festive season harks back to her Irish roots. Mariah is the daughter of an Irish-American mother Patricia (née Hickey), an opera singer whose family hail from Cork, and an African-American/Venezuelan-American father. She has explained that she inherited her love of music from her mother, who was herself a singer of note, and who would often sing Irish songs to Mariah . Having won a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School for music, Patricia would go on to sing with the New York City Opera.

As a little girl in New York, Mariah had enjoyed traditional Christmases, carolling and singing hymns, and ‘All I Want For Christmas’ echoes those early touchstones, notably with the inclusion of church-like bells. But she was determined to deliver a song that would capture the real meaning of Christmas for infatuated lovers the world over. Musically, it has been observed that the song is everything an Irish family Christmas should be: joyous, exhilarating and loud. Mariah and Patricia later collaborated on a version of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ for her Merry Christmas II album in 2010. But nothing could match the sparkle of the original.

Maria Carey: never short of sparkle

There are dozens of instrumental treatments and cover versions of the song, the two most notable perhaps by Justin Bieber with Mariah Carey and by Dolly Parton and Jimmy Fallon. Cee Lo Green, Jamie Callum, Lady Antebellum (now Lady A), Marillion, the Cast of Glee, and Irish artists Celtic Thunder, Samantha Mumba with Phil Coulter and his Orchestra and Catherine McGrath have all put their personal stamp on it.

With the successful 2019 re-release of ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’, Carey became the first artist to have a Hot 100 No.1 in four separate decades (the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s and the 2020s). A special performance of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ featuring Carey’s twin-children, Moroccan and Monroe, was included in the 2021 TV special Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special on Apple TV+. The original video, meanwhile, has been viewed over 260 million times on YouTube.

As the singer of Billboard’s ‘Greatest Holiday Song of All Time’, Mariah Carey has usurped the claims of greats like Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole to the top spot. And she has joined two other Irish greats, Shane MacGowan (‘Fairytale of New York') and Bob Geldof (‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’) at the festive song summit. Maybe Christmas really is an Irish thing after all...