Christmas songs had been a big hit for a minute before Carey’s song was registered.
If you count Wham!’s plaintive “Last Christmas” as a holiday classic, we’re talking 1984. If you want to add more cheer to your reindeer journey, it was in 1970 that José Feliciano first wished us “Feliz Navidad.”
John Lennon and Yoko Ono made their cultural mark with 1971’s “Happy Christmas (The War Is Over),” but it wasn’t initially a big hit in the United States. And it’s more depressing than hilarious, with Carey herself calling it “pretty sad.”
It really hasn’t been since Brenda Lee’s 1958 banger ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ (written by Johnny Marks) that such an upbeat song has been added to the multi-million record selling canon. And suffice to say, Carrie’s magic has yet to be replicated.
Athanasieff compared their songs to “a cosmic event that happens once every five billion years,” and told Billboard, “Thousands of original Christmas songs have been written over the past 20 years…but for some reason, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just happened to be that song.”
And he said this was “the last major song to go into the Christmas classics, but then the door slammed shut and stayed shut.”
As for why she thinks the song has endured for 30 years, Carey told Nightline in 2023, “I think it’s because I really love the holidays.” “It’s not fake.”
