Even if you don't want a lot for Christmas, chances are you're going to get your fill of Mariah Carey . The octave-slaying singer has become synonymous with the holiday season thanks to her unavoidable 1994 classic "All I Want for Christmas Is You," the charmingly bouncy ode to Yuletide romance and the days when Christmas songs regularly climbed the charts. "My goal was to do something timeless," Carey told ABC News in 2023, "so it didn't feel like the '90s, which is when I wrote it.
" She recalled working out the melody on "this little Casio keyboard and writing down words and thinking about, 'What do I think of at Christmas? What do I love? What do I want? What do I dream of?'" But while the opening strains of the xylophone are unmistakable now, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" was not a career-defining hit right away, despite Carey being one of the most popular singers on the planet at the time. Her 1994 album Merry Christmas followed what remains the best-selling LP of her career, 1993's Music Box . Meaning, at some point, "All I Want for Christmas Is You" went from savvy addition to that holiday mix you burned on your desktop computer to almost 2 billion streams on Spotify.
And there's no better time to explain the mysteries of holiday marketing than Nov. 1. (Though Carey herself has made it clear she doesn't start listening to Christmas music "until it's actually the season to do that.
") So before you switch from pumpkin spice to peppermint mocha, unwrap these 10 secret.