Mariah Carey Ushers in the Holidays With Addams Family-Themed Video
Mariah Carey Declares “It’s Time” for the Holiday Season with Addams Family-Themed Video
Mariah Carey is shaking off spooky season.
The Grammy winner officially rang in the holiday season with her annual social media announcement declaring that “it’s time” to celebrate at midnight Nov. 1—and this year, she did it with a little help from The Addams Family.
In the black-and-white clip, which was sponsored by Kay Jewelers, Mariah is dressed as Morticia Addams from the classic film as she ballroom dances with a man dressed as the character’s husband, Gomez Addams.
And after sharing a few saucy moments together, Mariah pushes him aside, throws a dagger at him and then looks towards a wardrobe that opens to reveal her signature red Christmas ensemble as the clock strikes midnight.
The screen then shatters into color as Mariah says “it’s tiiiime!” as the opening notes of her record-breaking holiday hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” starts playing and Gomez actually turns into a snowman.
Mariah’s announcement doesn’t just officially ring in the holiday season or signal that it’s time to start listening to her 1994 album Merry Christmas—it also means she’s about to hit the road. The “Heartbreaker” singer’s 21-date holiday tour kicks off in Highland, Calif., Nov. 6.
In fact, in addition to the annual declaration, Mariah also teased its arrival with a couple of cheeky videos that teased that it wasn’t time quite yet.
The singer appeared on a private jet in a clip she shared to Instagram Oct. 2 during which the pilot says they’re headed to the North Pole as the beginning of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” plays, to which Mariah responds, “Not yet! They’re always trying to rush me.”
And in another video shared Oct. 30, Mariah starts to sing the song before she’s interrupted by Kerry Washington who tells her, “It’s not your season yet, Mariah; it’s voting season!”
To which she tells the Scandal actress, “Yes, I am registered. Yes, I made a plan, and I executed it.”
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The 55-year-old, who began posting her elaborate “it’s time” videos about five years ago, said that the announcements came about organically.
“[At first], it wasn’t even really like an announcement,” Mariah told The New York Times in an interview published Nov. 1. “People would say, ‘Hey, when is it OK to put our lights up and put our tree up?’ and ‘When do you do it?’ People would ask me that because I guess they thought I was very Christmassy.”
Sooner or later, a catchphrase was born.
“I love ‘it’s time,'” she added. “It’s so fun.”
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The Glitter actress shared that, while she encourages others to get in the holiday spirit as early as Nov. 1 every year, she doesn’t actually decorate herself until much closer to Christmas.
“There’s so much decoration on the tour, on the stage,” she explained, “that get you into the spirit,” so she doesn’t put up decorations until her family—which includes 13-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe, whose dad is Nick Cannon—travels to Aspen, Colo., to celebrate the holiday each year.
“It’s something that I look forward to all year,” Mariah shared. “Maybe people think it’s something that I put on, but it’s really my favorite time of year.”
Keep reading for more about Mariah’s signature holiday hit, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
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Be Good for Goodness Sake
Mariah Carey‘s 1994 album Merry Christmas is mostly covers—”Silent Night,” “Joy to the World,” etc.—but consequentially included three original tracks: “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” “Miss You Most (At Christmas Time)” and “Jesus Born on This Day.”
And while we may take that first one for granted now, Carey’s cowriter on those three songs, Walter Afanasieff, pointed out that it takes big boughs of holly to take a stab at making new Christmas music.
“Going into an original Christmas song, you’ve got to be really smart to know all the landmines that you’re going to be stepping on,” he explained in a 2014 interview with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. “If a smart writer writes a song and just boldly goes into the stereotype of jingle and mistle and frosty and Rudolph and Santa…Ugh, it just becomes a mess.”
Carey’s “genius,” he added, was that she came up with an up-tempo “positive love song” that could be dedicated to anybody.
And the third time was the charm, because “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was the last of the new tracks they wrote for the album, which they started working on in 1993.
Legacy Recordings
Do You Hear What I Hear?
Explaining their writing process, Afanasieff—who collaborated with Mimi on her first six studio albums—said that he would start playing. Then, “she starts developing a melody and melodic path,” he told ASCAP. “We play a little musical ping-pong back and forth.”
When Carey would sing something that took the music in a different direction, he’d follow, and “we just go back and forth,” he continued. “Musically it was that big deal effort on ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ It’s a very simple arrangement.”
In fact, he added, “At the time I thought it was overly simple and I didn’t really like it.”
Aside from Carey’s pitch-perfect lyrics, “I tried to make it a little more unique, putting in some special chords that you really don’t hear a lot of, which made it unique and special,” Afanasieff told Billboard in 2014. “I think that’s one of the components that made it unique year after year. That part of it took maybe an hour, and then I went home.”
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Do You Want to Build a Program?
First you hear the tinkle of the xylophone, then Carey comes in with her slow burn, after which the drums and piano get going and it’s off to winter wonderland with sleigh bells jingling. So the recording studio must have been rockin’ when the band laid down the track in the summer of 1994, right?
“That entire song is just me at the computer,” Afanasieff told ASCAP, “and the only other thing real on there is the vocals.”
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All She Ever Wanted
When her album came out, Carey, the self-proclaimed “hugest Christmas fanatic there is,” said she wasn’t trying to compete with the Yuletide hitmakers of the past.
“I look at it as more of me giving my little contribution to the world of Christmas songs,” she told CBS News in 1994, “and hopefully my fans will enjoy them and it will be something for me to sing during the holidays.”
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I Just Want You for My Own
Carey has her own recollection of how “All I Want for Christmas Is You” came to be, and it generally doesn’t involve another person being in the room.
“I just sat down, decorated a little tree and put on It’s a Wonderful Life and tried to get into that mood,” she told Cosmopolitan in 2019. “Then I sat in this small room with a keyboard and started doing little melodies and stuff.”
In the Amazon Music documentary Mariah Carey Is Christmas: The Story of “All I Want for Christmas Is You that same year,” she did recall taking the track to “Walter A.” to co-produce.
Addressing the legend that it only took 15 minutes to come together, Carey said on Nightline in 2023 that writing the song was a “pretty fast” process. “I was working on it by myself,” she added. “So I was, you know, [humming the opening bar], writing on this little Casio keyboard.”
While Afanasieff has enjoyed the rewards that have come with being officially credited as the song’s cowriter and producer—”I own 50 percent of the song,” he told Variety in 2019—he does sometimes feel like the queen of Christmas left him a lump of coal.
“She’s the one that made the song a hit and she’s awesome,” he said. “But she definitely does not share credit where credit is due.”
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To the Top of the Porch, to the Top of the Wall
Despite its surge in ubiquity years beforehand, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” didn’t reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart until 2019.
But, it has reached the mountaintop every year since.
“I can’t sit there and go, This has to happen,” Carey told the Los Angeles Times ahead of the Nov. 6 launch of her annual (since 2014, minus 2020) Christmas tour. But, she added, “It’s happened so many times that I’m thrilled. And should it happen again, I would be even more thrilled.”
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Holiday Tradition
We’ll see what 2024 holds, but Carey has at the very least gotten used to breaking her own records on Christmas Eve.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” first claimed the record for most Dec. 24 Spotify streams in 2017, with 10.8 million plays, then surpassed the total in 2018 with 10.82 million and topped itself again in 2019 with more than 12 million.
On Dec. 24, 2022, it bested Adele‘s “Go Easy on Me” for most streams on any day, with 21,273,357.
And, a year later, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” set the new record for most streams in a day with more than 23.7 million, as well as became the most streamed Christmas song ever with upward of 1.5 billion plays.
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It’s Mariah, Actually!
You are forgiven if on first viewing you thought that the song the wildly talented object of Thomas Brodie-Sangster‘s affection sings toward the end of 2002’s Love Actually was an original tune written for the movie.
Because what Olivia Olson‘s performance of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” basically changed history. Or altered fate, whichever, as countless moviegoers were compelled to track down the original.
“That’s another phenomenon we should pay attention to,” Afanasieff told Billboard in 2014. “Mariah Carey very, very rarely allows someone to record any of her songs in any film or television or any other medium.”
And while she turned down countless requests for others to record her signature Christmas song over the years, she made an exception for Love Actually.
“I think she just had a particular fondness for the movie,” Afanasieff recalled. “She liked the script and she liked the actors. I’m sure she thought, ‘It’s a young girl, it’s the right time.'”
Doubleday Books for Young Readers
Stocking Stuffer
The “All I Want for Christmas Is You” universe includes a children’s book and a 2017 animated film of the same name. According to ABC News, Carey’s earnings from the song have been put at $72 million as of December 2023.
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Once in a Generation
Before Carey’s tune registered, it had been a minute since a Christmas song was also a massive hit.
If you count Wham!‘s mournful “Last Christmas” as a holiday staple, we’re talking 1984. If you prefer more pep in your reindeer’s step, Jose Feliciano first wished us “Feliz Navidad” in 1970.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono made their cultural mark with 1971’s “Happy Xmas (The War Is Over),” but that wasn’t a huge hit in the U.S. at first. And it’s more melancholy than merry, Carey herself calling it “pretty sad.”
Really not since Brenda Lee‘s 1958 banger “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (written by Johnny Marks) had there been such an upbeat addition to the canon that also sold millions of records. And suffice it to say, the Carey magic has not been replicated yet.
Comparing their song to “a cosmic occurrence that happens once every 5 billion years,” Atanasieff told Billboard that “thousands of original Christmas songs have been written in the last 20 years…But for whatever reason ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just became that song.”
And, he added, it “was the last major song to enter that Christmas canon, and then the door slammed shut. It just closed.”
As to why she thought the song had endured for three decades, “I think it’s because I really, truly love the holidays,” Carey told Nightline in 2023. “It’s not fake.”
