Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” Hits #1, 25 Years After Its Release
Mariah Carey has just scored her 19th #1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, and she’s done it with a song that’s 25 years old. Back in 1994, Carey released “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” a bubbly holiday jam that she co-wrote and co-produced with Walter Afanasieff. Today, for the first time ever, that song is the #1 song in America. This is the first time a song that old has hit #1, and it brings Carey close to one of the all-time unbreakable chart records.
Thanks to a Billboard technicality, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” didn’t even appear on the Billboard Hot 100 when it first came out. Back then, Billboard would only allow songs to chart if they’d been commercially released as singles. “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was an album track on Carey’s Merry Christmas EP, so it was ineligible for the big chart. (It made it as high as #12 on the Radio Songs chart.)
Since then, though, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has become a holiday-season perennial, the kind of song that immediately goes into heavy rotation after Thanksgiving and gets played at every office Christmas party. It’s been covered by a whole lot of people: Ariana Grande, My Chemical Romance, Kylie Minogue and Mumford And Sons together. And now that Billboard factors streaming into its chart tallies, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” reliably charts every year. It first hit the top 10 of the Hot 100 in 2017, and it tied its previous high of #3 last week. Today, Forbes reports that the song has claimed its spot at #1.
This gives Mariah Carey her 19th #1 single, and her first since 2008’s “Touch My Body.” The Beatles remain the kings of the Hot 100. They have 20 #1 singles, more than any other artist in history. But now we have to consider the possibility that Mariah Carey could tie or even break that record. Also, Mariah Carey has now earned #1 singles in three consecutive decades — the ’90s, the ’00s, and the ’10s. She just barely made the cutoff!
“All I Want For Christmas Is You” is also only the second Christmas song ever to hit #1 on the Hot 100. The last time this happened was 61 years ago, when the Chipmunks and David Seville’s “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” topped the chart.
Carey also synced things up today, appearing on the latest episode of Billy Eichner’s web series Billy On The Street:
IT’S HERE!!! BILLY ON THE STREET with the LEGENDARY @MARIAHCAREY!!! A HOLIDAY GIFT FOR THE WORLD!!!!! pic.twitter.com/E5rTilP09V
— billy eichner (@billyeichner) December 16, 2019