How Mariah Carey Became The Queen Of Christmas

Mariah Carey’s been known as the Queen of Christmas since dropping 1994’s Merry Christmas, featuring “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” With her second AppleTV+ special, Mariah’s Christmas: The Magic Continues, out Dec. 3, she’ll further cement her status as the holiday’s ruler.

A sequel to 2020’s Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special, the special includes Carey’s debut performance of “Fall In Love at Christmas” alongside Khalid and Kirk Franklin. Along with its release, feast your eyes on these ultra-festive photos of her through the years.

Carey’s love for Christmas was sparked young, as her childhood rarely included an ideal holiday season. “I always wanted things to be perfect for the holidays, and they never were,” she said. “So I just made a pact with myself that I wasn’t going to allow that to happen anymore.”

Following the release of 1993’s Music Box, she turned her admiration for the holiday into gold with Merry Christmas. Regarded as one of the greatest holiday albums of all time by Billboard, it's also the best-selling Christmas album by a woman with over 15 million copies sold.

Released as the lead single, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has been called “one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon.” After long dominating seasonal charts, the song topped the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time in 2019, 25 years post-release.

“After I wrote ‘All I Want For Christmas is You,’ very early in my career, I started every year to be able to create what I wanted to do for the holidays,” Carey recently said. “I have to be thankful for it. It comes from a real place of longing, and it's pretty celebratory.”

“My relationship with Merry Christmas is better than it was when I first made the album,” Carey said in 2019, recalling how she used to “nitpick” many vocal and production choices. “It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s a throwaway.’ This was a real labor of love, and I’m a perfectionist.”

Since Merry Christmas, Carey’s pursued many other festive projects, including annual Christmas concerts, 2010’s Merry Christmas II You album, several television specials, and an “All I Want For Christmas Is You” children's book, which was made into an animated film.

A far cry from her childhood, Carey now goes all out for Christmas with her twins, Moroccan and Monroe: “I literally go to a snowy place. Reindeer are there. I’m not making this up. Santa Claus comes, hangs out with the kids... Even if I didn’t have kids, I would be doing this.”

Even 2020 couldn’t stop her holiday cheer, as Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special premiered on AppleTV+ in December, complete with appearances from Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson. “We can’t just let the bleakness of [this year] foil all of the extra fun things that we do every year.”

This year, it seems Carey’s looking to outdo herself yet again with festive content. In addition to Mariah’s Christmas: The Magic Continues, she’s launched brands of holiday cookies and Irish cream and partnered with MSCHF to give gift cards and collectible items to fans.