Merry almost-Christmas! Are you listening to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You?” No? Then turn on any adult contemporary radio station and wait five seconds.
As we zoom toward the Yule, I’m reposting the tribute I wrote last year to Carey’s contemporary Christmas classic. Read it again for the first time!
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It’s December! This is my birthday month and Christmas month. I’ve already set the DVR to record every claymation holiday special.
To kick off the best four weeks of the year, I’m making a spirited claim: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is the only significant Christmas song written since 1984.
(see why…)
I know some of you gag when you hear Mariah’s name, but hear me out: I’m not saying it’s the only good Christmas song written in the last twenty-five years. I’m saying it’s the only one with staying power.
I mean, can you name another recent Christmas song that’s as evergreen as “All I Want For Christmas Is You?” To come close, you have to reach back to “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” which came out in 1984.
Along they way, you’ve had your “Christmas in Hollis” and your “This One’s For The Children” and your “Christmas Shoes,” but they all disappeared after one or two seasons. Meanwhile, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came out in 1994, and it’s still everywhere, every year.
For instance, it’s only December 2nd, and the song is already in the top 20 on the iTunes best sellers list. It was featured in Love, Actually. It’s been covered by Shania Twain, My Chemical Romance, and Miley Cyrus. In 2006 Sasha Frere-Jones declared it “one of the few worthy additions to the modern day holiday canon.”
But while that’s all very nice, here’s the most important thing: The song, which Carey co-wrote and co-produced with Walter Afanasieff, is resilient because it’s good. Really good. And most new Christmas songs just… aren’t.
In pinpointing the song’s genius, you could almost stop with the bouncy-bounce sleigh bells. But there’s also its masterful balance of classic and modern pop. For every girl-group backing vocal, there’s a drum machine. For every hand clap, there’s a contemporary vocal flourish. Yet somehow, the elements keep each other in check. The track is neither a self-conscious throwback nor a tuneless slave to melisma.
That balance is clear in the song’s best moment: In the very last chorus, we hear Ronettes-like backing vocalists sing “all I want for Christmaaaaas,” then we hear some old-fashioned percussion mixed with a drum fill, and then Mariah stretches the word “is” into twenty syllables.
And then? “Yooooo-ooo-oo-uuu!” High note! Return of the sleigh bells! Funky vocal riffs! Worlds colliding!
Aaaah. I’m listening as I write this, and that’s still one of my favorite moments in pop music history. There’s so much joy in it, so much effortless fun.
And fun is important. Whereas so many modern Christmas songs want me to learn a valuable lesson or chortle at the sappiness of the holidays, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” just wants me to be happy. That’s exactly what I need: A feel-good party in a winter coat.
What do you guys think? Do you share my joy, or does this song… um… put coal in your stockings?
12 responses so far ↓
1 Kristin // Dec 22, 2009 at 10:23 am
I totally agree with you, Mark. You perfectly articulated all of the reasons why, despite my MC disdain, I always turn this puppy up when it comes on the radio every fifteen minutes from Thanksgiving through Christmas. Merry Christmas to you, old friend!!
2 katy // Dec 22, 2009 at 11:01 am
I tried to challenge you with “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer,” but it turns out it charted in 1984, too.
3 Mary // Dec 22, 2009 at 11:50 am
I do not like Mariah Carey. Her music, I mean. She could be a perfectly nice lady, despite the fact that I think she’s a bit of a crazy pants.
I actually paid money for this song though. I find it absolutely delightful. I danced around a half-decorated Christmas tree to this song last weekend with a big glass of wine in my hand.
4 Gonzalo // Dec 22, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Yes! I love this song. I’m not a huge Christmas person, but this is more infectious than 95% of Christmas songs out there. I always try to make my best Mariah impression during that climax (which you described so well). I often end up howling like a lunatic and waking up the neighbors. Yes, I can’t resist singing this out loud even if it’s 3am.
By the way, one other modern-ish song that has had some staying power is Wham’s “Last Christmas”, which came out in 1984 too. Not the same level of brilliance, but it seems to have endured the test of time (at least it has in the UK… is it as famous here in the US?).
5 Michael // Dec 22, 2009 at 11:51 pm
Sorry. Ugh. And let’s be clear: it’s not a Christmas song–it’s a pop love ballad that says “Forget Christmas, I prefer teenybop romance.” If I wrote a song called “All I want to do for the Fourth of July is forget the fireworks, history, and patriotism and get a puppy” and the rest of the lyrics were about the excellence of puppies–would it be a fourth of July song?
6 InfoMofo // Dec 23, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I also like the “Love Actually” version.
Don’t tell anyone.
7 Mark Blankenship // Dec 23, 2009 at 1:31 pm
But Michael, from another perspective, couldn’t you say this song has a “true spirit of Christmas” lyric? It rejects a lot of the signposts that supposedly make Christmas “meaningful”—gifts, Santa, etc.—and instead says that all the singer needs to be happy is love.
Sure, there’s not a religious angle, but for a lot of people, Christmas is a holiday that focuses less on religion and more on the secular, satisfying spirit of being in love and being with those loved ones. I don’t have a problem with that, so to my mind, then, a romantic song with a Christmas bent is perfectly appropriate.
8 Mark Blankenship // Dec 23, 2009 at 1:33 pm
Hey Gonzalo and Katy — 1984 was really a banner year for new Christmas songs, right? Band Aid, Elmo and Patsy, and Wham!… oh my!
To answer your question, Gonzalo, “Last Christmas” was never officially released as a single in the U.S., but it gets a lot of play here.
9 Michael // Dec 23, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Mark: In my opinion, you know better, and your word-choices show it: you slide between “love,” “in love,” and “being with loved ones.” But my whole point is that these aren’t all the same, and, while Christmas may well be associated, by tradition and long experience, with family gathering and family affection (I’ll leave religion out of it), that’s not what’s evoked here. The Spirit of Christmas is about being in love and caring about nothing else? Bah! Being in love is great, but it’s what pop songs are about, not what Christmas is about–which is another, great, but different thing. (Doesn’t mean I’m not glad the song makes you happy. But not everything that makes you happy in December is about Christmas. Give or take the jingle bells on the track, would the song lose anything if the title was “All I want this summer . . . ” of “All I want for my birthday . . . ?”) Q.E.D. But enjoy it anyway.
10 Mark Blankenship // Dec 23, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Well, Michael… perhaps my word choice was a little sloppy because I wrote that last comment while watching a rerun of Roseanne. I kept getting distracted by the hilarity.
To restate my point with perhaps more precision, I think it’s absolutely valid for “All I Want for Christmas is You” to be considered an honest-to-god Christmas song. To me, it’s valid to declare that all you need to be happy during Christmas is the love of another person because to me, the purpose of Christmas is to take a moment to be incredibly grateful for the people you love.
That’s a large sentiment, and I see a piece of it reflected in this song. The giddy belief that your mate is all you need to be happy is certainly a legitimate element of the spirit that makes Christmas important to me.
Now, is that giddiness the only way to express the belief that Christmas is about giving thanks for loved ones? No. There are many ways a work of art can express the thanks that I consider to be the spirit of Christmas. There are certainly more moving ways to express that idea. There are more spiritual ways. There are more community-minded ways, and there are more serious ways, too. But at the end of the day, “All I Want for Christmas is You,” silly pop song that it is, still captures at least a small part of what Christmas means to me.
And is my take on what Christmas means the only take that’s valid? No. There are plenty of great ways to interpret the holiday. I mean, I also appreciate it as a reminder that we should be nice to strangers, look for the godliness in ourselves and others, and really think about gifts that other people want to receive. I just happen to put “thanksgiving” at the top of my personal list. But if somebody else wants to focus on five other things altogether, then good for them.
To that end, I’m interested to know what Christmas is about for you, and for all my readers. What are you looking to see reflected in a piece of Christmas-related art? What makes a work of Christmas art valid for you?
11 Michael // Dec 24, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Mark: You have a right to define your terms as you choose, of course. But I protest that your personal definition comes late in the discussion: By the standard you’ve voiced here, any celebratory love song could be a Christmas song if you choose to make the association. (Or a Thanksgiving song, for that matter.) Any song that makes you feel happy is a Christmas song by this association. And by that standard, of course this song qualifies. And if Christmas is really centrally about gratitude for the human love in your life, then “O Come , O Come, Emmanuel,” or “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” which are about Jesus as Messiah, for you, only qualify as Christmas songs . . . at a certain remove? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have raised the argument in the first place. (smile)
12 Jon Foerster // Dec 25, 2009 at 3:35 am
This is a good discussion between Mark and Michael but I just want to address one point (from Michael):
“Give or take the jingle bells on the track, would the song lose anything if the title was “All I want this summer . . . ” of “All I want for my birthday . . . ?”
Answer: Yes it would. Your point that the song isn’t inherently “about” Christmas because it can be substituted for any other holiday/time of year is incorrect, since the lyrics contain many references that are solely Christmas-related: “presents”, “Christmas tree”, “stockings”, “reindeer”, “North Pole”, “Santa Claus” (and for good measure, “St. Nick”) are all invoked.
While I don’t necessarily agree with your overall position (I love the song myself), I think your stronger point — and more fascinating, if we apply the standards of close-reading and textual analysis — is the one you initially made about the song dismissing Christmas artifice for pop artifice. This is an excellent reading/critique of the song, and it’s a more robust argument; I was intrigued by this conceit and wanted to hear more about it. Switching midstream to “the song could be switched for any other song” is intellectually disappointing since it is outside the scope of the initial argument, doesn’t support the initial argument, and is ultimately refuted by the examples I listed above.
Good catch though on Mark “sliding” between definitions of “love” (insisting on a delineation of the particulars of intent, is the sign of an intellectually honest debate). Although let me also assure Mark that I agree with him on the overall merit of “All I Want for Christmas is You”, and that I have enjoyed reading his blog for some time now.
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