All I Want For Christmas Is You (Piano Solo sheet music)
Christmas begins when Mariah Carey sings it: why the carol ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ marks the beginning of the holidays
The singer, aware of the enormous success of her song, whose Google searches peak after Halloween, makes the global meme her own to continue positioning herself as the true queen of Christmas.
Mariah Carey publishes, on November 1, 2022, a black and white video on her social networks in which she appears dressed as a witch, in a forest, surrounded by pumpkins and pedaling on a stationary bicycle. As she pedals, the dates for the month of October appear around her and, when the 31st day of the calendar finally starts, something explodes.
It’s Christmas. Mariah Carey reappears, this time dressed as Mrs. Claus on a reindeer, surrounded by snow, trees and gifts: “It’s about time!” She sings with her unmistakable high pitch. That is when the initial bells of All I Want For Christmas Is You begin to ring, the Christmas carol that he released in 1994 within his fourth studio album Merry Christmas and that became an instant success, topping the most listened to lists in 26 countries, including Australia, Canada, France and Germany.
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On why 28 years later, the song that kicks off Christmas has a lot to do with the movie Love Actually (2003). Also with the internet community, which turned a hit into a viral icon. And, finally, with Mariah Carey herself appropriating that vitality to position herself as the queen of the parties.
Firstly, the data. “The music industry should be dreaming of a white Christmas”, published in 2017 the American media specialized in economic information The Economist , referring to the success of the singer, who would bring her around 2.5 million dollars to the year in royalties , which, according to calculations by Forbes magazine , would have earned him a whopping $72 million today.
The Recording Industry Association of America awarded the song Diamond certification for having sold 10 million units: there are only 87 songs on that list, and none of them are Christmas carols. Each year, in addition, it returns to position itself as one of the most listened to along with hits of that year on the prestigious Billboard list , which classifies songs based on the activity of streaming platforms and sales of more than 200 territories all over the world.
All I Want For Christmas Is You hit all the emotional and sonorous keys expected of a good pop song: a 50-second intro that prepares the listener and builds suspense, a catchy harmony, a few bells for a festive touch, and above all , the voice of Mariah Carey doing her tricks. After years and years listening to the same carols, she came to establish a new way of singing for Christmas. And it worked.
In 2002, 22 years after the song’s release, director Richard Curtis chose the song as part of the soundtrack for the Christmas-themed romantic comedy Love Actually . In the film, the song was part of a performance at a school Christmas party, at the moment when all the protagonists of this choral film begin to meet.
The girl with whom one of the characters was in love sings the song, while he plays the drums, self-absorbed. If the song had already broken records in the nineties, the film from the early two thousand got it discovered by new generations, while making previous generations not forget about it.
After Love Actually , it was reborn through covers by artists such as My Chemical Romance, in 2004; Demi Lovato , in 2012; or Ariana Grande , in 2014, although none achieved the success that its original version achieved.
And then the internet came
According to KnowYourMeme.com, the website that investigates when and why a viral trend is born, it all started in 2015, when a Reddit forum user named linkognito posted an image of the YouTube trend chart about the music video of the song.
Noticing the start of a surge of interest in October, he captioned the image “It Begins,” referring to the moment when, all over the world, people start listening to All I Want For Christmas Is You on the platform again. The post has 4,939 points, similar to the likes of social networks.
A year later, in November 2016, Zach Cole tweeted a similar image, also showing a spike in interest immediately after Halloween. The Twitter user also wrote: “It begins.” The tweet garnered 55,000 retweets and more than 78,000 favorites in less than a month. Since then, many Internet users, year after year, have uploaded screenshots of search trends on Google or YouTube to various social networks as soon as November arrives with the same title, proving that Christmas can be different every year, but Mariah Carey remains a constant.
It was a matter of time before the artist herself joined the meme. It happened for the first time in 2021, when he published a surprise video on his Instagram (where today he has 11.1 million followers), immediately after Halloween, in which he patiently waited for midnight on October 31. to be able to break a few pumpkins with her huge candy cane and dressed in a long red sequined dress.
The video had almost 1,300,000 views. The strategy is intelligent: why wait for the internet community to inaugurate Christmas if it can do so with the song that best represents these dates in recent years? Everything indicates that Mariah Carey, like Mon Chéri chocolates, knows when it’s time to hit the market again.
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Mariah Carey’s passion for Christmas stems from her dysfunctional childhood holidays
The artist, the undisputed queen at this time of year for her successful song ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, recounts: “There was always someone in my family who would ruin the moment. She made a pact with myself so it wouldn’t happen anymore.”
As the singer has revealed in an interview with Elle , her passion for Christmas comes from those “dysfunctional” holidays that she experienced as a child. “I think it’s that longing that she had when she was a child, that she always wanted things to be perfect for these dates… And they never were. There was always someone who ruined the moment, some dysfunctional family member who would come and frustrate everything. So I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t let this happen anymore,” she said.
A pact that she seems to have made a reality because for 26 years her song has become the soundtrack of almost every home and Christmas party. “A lot of very bad things happened to me when she was 12 years old. But there is also the spirit of that girl, that fighter who does not give up, who accepts who she is, ” she highlighted to the same publication.
A harsh childhood and adolescence marked by racism and violence that Carey also talks about in her memoirs, The meaning of Mariah Carey , published last September, where she reveals unknown details that confirm that the public brilliance of the stars is not always with them. in his private facet.
“When I was 12 years old, my sister drugged me with Valium, offered me a nail on my little finger full of cocaine, gave me third-degree burns and tried to sell me to a pimp,” Carey says in her book to add that for her brothers and her own mother came to be treated like “an ATM in a wig” as soon as she became famous. According to her version, she felt abandoned and all of them “simply tried to make me believe that I was institutionally unstable immediately after having signed the largest economic agreement of a solo artist.”
Carey talks about the violence she felt at home as a child, recounts several physical altercations and dwells on one that her brother had especially violent towards her mother, forcing her to call a family friend for help. She was six years old and when the police arrived, she still remembers how one of the agents looked at her and, turning to her partner, said: “If this girl makes it, it will be a miracle.”