The dark (true) story of “All I want for Christmas is you”

A woman prey to negative and horrible thoughtsvictim of abuse which – she would tell many years later – she suffered from her husband and manager Tommy Mottola. A old used Casio keyboard, “bought cheaply”. The desire to experience a Christmas different from the one he is experiencing, spent watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV, Frank Capra’s masterpiece on story of a man, George Bailey (played by James Stewart), who is on the verge of committing suicide on Christmas Eve and who is ultimately saved – and redeemed – by a guardian angel sent by God. Here’s what’s behind the story of “

All I want for Christmas is you” by Mariah Carey: what the New Yorker defined as “one of the few modern additions of value to the musical canon of Christmas carols”, perhaps tied with “Last Christmas” by Wham! (released ten years earlier), this year celebrates its first thirty years together with the album it was part of, “Merry Christmas”. The anniversary – celebrated by Mariah Carey and Sony Music with a series of special re-releases, including 12″ vinyl, box sets, limited edition reprintsall pre-orderable here – represents a perfect opportunity to tell the secrets and hidden meanings behind the apparently joyful and carefree melody that has made “All I want for Christmas” the most popular contemporary Christmas song in the world, with that dramatic subtext yet to be deciphered.

And to think that Mottolafrom which the pop star would only divorce in 1998, four years after the release of the hit, in the original video clip – as well as 790 million views on YouTubethree decades later – makes a cameo as Santa Claus. “Make my wish come true / all I want for Christmas is you”, Mariah sang. And those words, that desire, hid a great pain. Mottola, twenty-one years older than Carey, had discovered, signed and cast her when she was only eighteen: he wanted to make her the female version of Michael Jackson. And he subjected her, he would denounce her in 2020 in the touching autobiography “The Meaning of Mariah Carey”, to pressures that were very hard to withstand: “

I had to go to my room in silence – he says – to try to write my songs, when his voice punctually came from the speakers installed in the room, asking me ‘what are you doing?’. That year, it was 1994, Mariah just wanted to experience a peaceful, peaceful Christmas: “I had started to think about what I liked about Christmas. Lights, gifts, lit fireplaces. I have loved Christmas since I was a child, but I have always had no money and therefore I have never been able to experience the holiday like my peers. Coming from a dysfunctional family I wanted my Christmas to be perfect. So when I wrote it I put every ounce of my will into trying to reconstruct a perfect moment.” But Christmas, as you can imagine, was only the metaphor of the serenity that the singer was looking for, in her desperation.

“All I want for Christmas is you” captured that sweetness, that purity: “I was 22, but I wasn’t that far from being a little girl.” The chords Mariah sketched out on her Casio keyboard were then developed into the arrangement by her right-hand man Walter Afanasieff (here the story of the “secret” father of “All I want for Christmas is you”), with whom Mariah Carey has to share the earnings deriving from listeners, sales, radio and television broadcasts, the inclusion of the song in commercials, films and so on. A business that would be worth the beauty of 6.1 million dollars per year. According to estimates,

Mariah Carey would earn an impressive $2.5 million every year with her classic: from 1994 to today they would amount to more 70 million dollars in earnings from sales, downloads and streaming. The hit has sold more than 16 million copies worldwide. Carey and Afanasieff they haven’t spoken to each other for more than twenty years: “We wrote three songs for the Christmas album that ‘All I want for Christmas is you’ came from, co-signed 50/50, all in the same time frame, in a house in New York during the summer of 1994 But for this song in particular, who knows why, Mariah almost doesn’t seem to want to admit that she wrote it with me,” regrets Afanasieff, real name Vladimir Nikitich Afanasev (he has Russian origins), 65 years, considered a legend of the stars and stripes music biz just for having produced the timeless Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” Wins the 1999 Grammy Award for Recording of the Year.

As the holidays approach, “All I want for Christmas is you” promptly reappears in the world charts: in the last week alone it has achieved totals on Spotify over 20 million streams globallyentering the top 20 of the Weekly Top Songs Global. A guarantee: “I recorded an entire Christmas album, it was a risk. At the time, MTV didn’t show videos of Christmas songs. It was a first for anyone to record an original Christmas song”.