Before Carey’s song was registered, it had been a minute since a Christmas song was also a big hit.
If you count bang!s mournful “Last Christmas” as a holiday staple, we’re talking 1984. If you prefer more pep in your step, Jose Feliciano first wished us “Feliz Navidad” in 1970.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono made its cultural mark with 1971’s “Happy Xmas (The War Is Over),” but it wasn’t a big hit in the US at first. And it’s more melancholic than happy, Carey herself calling it “quite sad”.
Not really since then Brenda LeeThe 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 yet to be replicated.
Comparing their singing to “a cosmic event that happens once every five billion years,” Atanasieff added Notice board that “thousands of original Christmas songs have been written over the past 20 years…But for whatever reason, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just became to song.”
And, he noted, it “was the last great song to enter that Christmas canon, and then the door slammed shut. It just closed.”
About why she thought the song had endured for three decades, “I think it’s because I really, really love the holidays,” Carey shared Night line in 2023. “It’s not fake.”
