Here’s a chart statistic that shouldn’t be possible. A song released in October 1994 — the same season as “Gangsta’s Paradise” and TLC’s “Creep” — hit No. 1 in America for the very first time in December 2019.
Twenty-five years. Most songs are lucky to get twenty-five weeks. Mariah Carey’s Christmas anthem took a quarter of a century to reach the top, and now it refuses to leave.
The song nobody wanted to make
The strange part is that the biggest Christmas hit of the modern era almost didn’t happen, because in 1994 a Christmas album was considered a career risk. Mariah was the hottest artist on the planet, fresh off “Music Box,” and holiday records were what you made on the way down, not at the peak.
The push came from Tommy Mottola — then both her husband and the head of Sony Music — who insisted on the album and added one condition: it couldn’t be all covers. There had to be at least one brand-new, original Christmas song.
So in the sweltering summer of 1994, Mariah and her longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff holed up at The Hit Factory in Manhattan, started messing around with an old-fashioned rock-and-roll boogie riff, and out came the melody and lyrics of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” — reportedly in one astonishingly quick burst. Afanasieff wasn’t even sure about it at first, later shrugging that its magic was really just simplicity.
An original Christmas song, written in an afternoon in July heat, that would outlive nearly everything else on the radio that year.
The legend of the fifteen minutes
Over the years, the story shrank into legend: Mariah wrote the whole thing in fifteen minutes on a little Casio keyboard. It’s a great story. It’s also, by her own admission, not quite right. Asked about it in 2019, she said, “I don’t know that it was exactly 15 minutes, but it was pretty quick,” and she’s since explained that she started the song alone on a small keyboard in upstate New York before finishing it with Afanasieff — and that the record itself, with its walls of layered background vocals, took real time to build.
Afanasieff, for his part, has pushed back harder, disputing her version of who contributed what — a quiet, decades-long disagreement between the two people who share one of the most valuable songwriting credits in existence. Someone else wanted a piece too: a musician who’d recorded a different song with the same title in 1989 sued for $20 million in 2022. The case was thrown out.
Why it took 25 years
So why didn’t the song hit No. 1 back in 1994, when it was everywhere? A technicality: it was never released as a standalone commercial single in the US, which made it ineligible for the Hot 100 under the rules of the day. For two decades it was arguably the most famous song in America that officially didn’t chart.
Then streaming rewrote the rules. Every December, millions of people played the song, and suddenly every one of those plays counted. It crept into the top 10 in 2017, and in December 2019 — twenty-five years and two months after release — it finally hit No. 1, setting a record for the longest climb to the top in chart history. It has returned to reclaim the spot every December since, as reliably as the tree going up.
The gift that keeps on giving
The money is where this becomes a fairy tale. The song is estimated to earn Mariah somewhere between $2.5 and $3 million every single year, on top of the $60-million-plus it had already generated — and the total value of the song, streams and covers and “Love Actually” sync included, has been put well north of $100 million.
Mariah, to her credit, is entirely in on the joke. Every November 1st she posts a video of herself defrosting from a block of ice, declaring “It’s time!”, and a month-long coronation begins.
Somewhere out there, the version of Mariah Carey who thought a Christmas album might hurt her career is having a very good laugh. The riskiest move of 1994 turned out to be the safest investment in pop music — a song that took an afternoon to write and a quarter-century to peak, and may simply never come down.
