Mariah Carey’s Christmas Classic Tells Us The Exact Moment The Holidays Have Arrived

“Mariah Carey, two of your first three albums, Mariah Carey and Music Box, topped the Billboard 200 for a combined 19 weeks, and your ‘disappointing’ second album, Emotions, still went multi-platinum. What’s next?”

“I’m going to release a Christmas album!”

It’s still a little crazy, over 20 years later, that at the top of her powers, after five consecutive number-one hits, followed by “I’ll Be There,” “Dreamlover,” and “Hero” also hitting #1 on the Hot 100, Mariah Carey made a Christmas album. The spiritual gamble paid off: Merry Christmas, released on Nov. 1, 1994, has sold over five million copies in the U.S. and it’s the fourth highest-selling album of all-time by a non-Asian solo artist in Japan. Plus, it gave us “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the only pseudo-contemporary song in the Christmas canon. It goes Bing Crosby, “Jingle Bells” dogs, and Mariah Carey.

Merry Christmas producer and “All I Want for Christmas Is You” co-writer Walter Afanasieff told Billboard that he had no idea the single would become such a classic. “Back then, you didn’t have a lot of artists with Christmas albums; it wasn’t a known science at all back then, and there was nobody who did new, big Christmas songs,” he said. “To think of it as a single that’s going to number one, that’s going to drive an album. We didn’t have an inkling of that… That’s what made it such a modern phenomenon.”

It’s true: the holiday season doesn’t begin until I hear “All I Want for Christmas Is You” in a CVS, and then every grocery store until January. It’s even earlier for some.

https://twitter.com/ZachACole/status/793920311414534144

That 2016 blip — which you can see on the song’s official music video — signals the countdown to Christmas, or if you’re Jewish, the desperate desire for someone to notice your “All I Want for Hanukkah Is You” parody.

The comments back the statistic up.

“Here we f*cking go” — that’s the real meaning of Christmas.

(Via Twitter)