Mariah Carey is the undisputed Queen of Christmas. The pop singer has lorded over the holiday charts for the past six years with her ubiquitous wintertime classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” It seems hard to believe it now if you’ve been anywhere near a store since Halloween, but the yuletide favorite that was released in 1994 did not chart until 2000 and did not hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 until 2019, fully 25 years after it first hit our ears.
Now, as the holidays really ramp up, the best-selling Christmas song of all time in the U.S. seems like a no-brainer to top the charts every year. But on Tuesday (Dec. 9), MC gave thanks for how it all started in a throwback video she re-posted from a fan feed of an interview she did in 1994 in which she was asked if she hopes one of the songs from her first holiday album, that year’s Merry Christmas, might some day be as ubiquitous as such standards as “White Christmas” or “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”
“Do you have the hope that one of your songs will be considered a classic one day?” the interviewer asks. “Wouldn’t that be nice, to have a classic Christmas song?”
“I would love it,” says Carey. “I mean I’m not going to be that arrogant as to say, ‘well, you know, this will become a classic or that’s a classic,’ but I’m very happy with them.”
Well, she needn’t have worried, because this week her all-timer jingled its way back to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, leaping up four spots to the top for a record-tying 19th total week at the peak of the chart. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” now matches the runs of two other chart champs: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” in 2024, and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, in 2019 — for the longest command over the chart’s 67-year history.
After first hitting the top 10 on the chart in December 2017, and the top five for the first time during the 2018 holiday season, “All I Want” finally reached the pinnacle in 2019 (for three weeks), 2020 (two), 2021 (three), 2022 (four), 2023 (two) and 2024 (four).
In case you haven’t heard it, listen to Carey’s Christmas chart champ below.
