Before Carey’s tune registered, it had been a minute since a Christmas song was also a massive hit.
If you count Wham!‘s mournful “Last Christmas” as a holiday staple, we’re talking 1984. If you prefer more pep in your reindeer’s step, Jose Feliciano first wished us “Feliz Navidad” in 1970.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono made their cultural mark with 1971’s “Happy Xmas (The War Is Over),” but that wasn’t a huge hit in the U.S. at first. And it’s more melancholy than merry, Carey herself calling it “pretty sad.”
Really not since Brenda Lee‘s 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 not been replicated yet.
Comparing their song to “a cosmic occurrence that happens once every 5 billion years,” Atanasieff told Billboard that “thousands of original Christmas songs have been written in the last 20 years…But for whatever reason ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just became that song.”
And, he noted, it “was the last major song to enter that Christmas canon, and then the door slammed shut. It just closed.”
As to why she thought the song had endured for three decades, “I think it’s because I really, truly love the holidays,” Carey told Nightline in 2023. “It’s not fake.”