When Mariah Carey announced in 1994 that she would be releasing an album of Christmas music, record industry figures were incredulous and critics scornful. Mariah was perceived as a manufactured star whose career had little chance of longevity, and Christmas music was seen as fogeyish and cliched. More than 25 years later, Mariah’s name is synonymous with Christmas, and her smash hit single All I Want For Christmas Is You has been cemented as the world’s favorite musical Christmas fixture.  

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A difficult childhood

Mariah was born in 1969 in Huntington, New York to Patricia, a retired opera singer and freelance vocal coach of Irish descent, and Alfred, an aeronautical engineer. Alfred’s family were black Venezuelans who had moved to New York in the 1910s, and by the time Mariah was born her parents had already encountered a good deal of racial abuse, not least from Patricia’s family. Mariah’s maternal grandmother had disowned Patricia for marrying a black man, and on the rare occasions where Patricia spoke to their family she pretended to be single. 

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The pair divorced when Mariah was just three years old, and she was raised by her mother in a run-down house that stuck out in a comparatively wealthy neighborhood. Mariah’s family also stuck out, and they were the constant target of shocking racial abuse from their neighbors. She recounts numerous incidents including gunshots being fired at her house, the family dog being poisoned, and their car being set on fire. On top of this, Mariah faced a great deal of personal hostility in her community and school, and would later recount that while she wasn’t white enough to fit in with those around her, she was also “not black enough to scare people into not saying stuff around me.” 

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You Don’t Know Her

Mariah found comfort in music, and then an escape. She started writing songs aged just 13, and - with the help of her mother’s tuition - began to develop her voice and the vocal techniques that would make her famous. She was in increasing demand as a backing singer throughout her high school years, to the point where her classmates, who rarely saw her,  gave her the nickname “Mirage”. She moved to New York City while still a teenager, and became a backup singer for the breakout freestyle singer Brenda K. Starr. This led to a chance meeting at a music industry party, where Mariah handed a demo tape to Tommy Mottola, at that time the head of Columbia Records. Legend has it that Mottola played the demo in the limo on his way home from the party and was so taken by what he heard that he commanded his driver to turn around, but was too late; Carey had already left, and it took Mottola two weeks to track her down. 

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Columbia invested heavily in their new teenage star, who Mottola saw as an artist who could compete with the other major female icons of the era, Whitney Houston and Madonna. Her self-titled debut had an enormous marketing budget, and Mariah delivered the songs to match. All five of the singles from Mariah Carey topped the Billboard charts, making her the first artist in history to have their first five singles reach number one, but while Mariah was a commercial success, she did not feel that she received the critical respect due to her as an artist and songwriter. At first she attributed this to being biracial in a music industry that was still heavily segregated into “white music” and “black music”, a theme that has been a constant source of concern throughout her career. However, the critics found more ammunition to attack Mariah with after she married Tommy Mottola in 1993. 

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Becoming Christmassy

When they married, Mariah was 23 and Tommy, who was now the CEO of Sony Music, was 44. Mariah’s many detractors leapt on the marriage as a symptom of the record label’s preferential treatment for an undeserving artist, and this was also used to explain her continued chart success. Sadly, the reality of the marriage was one of unhappiness and conflict. The pair divorced five years later, with Mariah accusing Mottola of being “increasingly controlling” throughout their marriage, with Mariah kept as an effective prisoner in their Hollywood mansion, and under constant supervision from staff and security cameras. 

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This unhappy situation - coupled with the lack of critical acclaim for her work - increasingly led Mariah to find ways to distinguish herself as an artist, and establish more independence in her working life. She chose an unusual way to approach this when she announced that she would be recording an album of Christmas music. The music world was shocked, and even reacted with ridicule; Christmas music was seen as the domain of aging crooners, a creative dead end and extremely uncool. Mariah was undaunted, and on October 29th 1994 she planted her flag firmly at the start of the holiday season with the release of All I Want For Christmas Is You, followed two days later by the album, Merry Christmas.  The album was a mixture of original songs by Carey, reimaginings of traditional carols, and covers of old standards. Critics were, predictably, unimpressed. All I Want For Christmas Is You did well but not spectacularly in the charts, and Merry Christmas stalled at number 3 on the Billboard charts. 

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Despite the initial lack of enthusiasm for the album, the seeds of Mariah’s Christmas dominance had been sown. She returned to more contemporary forms of music and continued to dominate the charts throughout the 1990s, and slowly the power of All I Want For Christmas Is You took hold over the holiday season. It also provided an anchor during difficult periods in Carey’s career, such as the ambitious and unsuccessful Glitter album and movie of 2001. The very public failure of the Glitter project was a difficult one for Mariah, and could have ended a lesser artist’s career, but she worked through her problems and re-emerged, triumphant, with 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi. All the while, All I Want For Christmas Is You was growing in power with every year, morphing from a surprising and catchy novelty single to the first song on the Christmas playlist.  

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#MARIAHSZN

Now, after nearly three decades of repetition, All I Want For Christmas Is You has become the Christmas standard, and broken all manner of records along the way. Perhaps the most telling record was broken in 2019, when the song finally made it to the top slot on the Billboard Top 100 chart, 25 years after it was initially released. This was Mariah’s 19th number one single, and one that had been bubbling away for a quarter of a century, the longest gap between a song’s release and the top slot on Billboard history.

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Equally incredible is the way that Carey has become personally synonymous with Christmas, largely through expert use of social media. Mariah now announces the start of the Christmas season through a flurry of carefully timed social media events that place her firmly at the center of festivities, and few begrudge her this iconic role as a holiday herald and Secret Superhero. 

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