As soon as you hear the jingle bells and iconic whistling tune of pop star Mariah Carey’s 1994 Christmas song All I Want for Christmas Is You, you know the most wonderful time of the year has arrived. officially arrived.

You probably know every word to this chart-topping tune, but there are more fun facts you should know about All I Want for Christmas Is You – the song that became an RIAA (Industry Association) US Recordings) certified diamond status in 2021.

Mariah Carey
Worth mentioning, All I Want for Christmas Is You is the first holiday song in recorded music history to achieve this feat.

All I Want for Christmas Is You was even placed on the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in April of this year.

Decades after its debut, Mariah Carey’s hit single – considered the “Queen of Christmas” – continues to break records.

Every holiday season, All I Want for Christmas Is You climbs the Billboard Hot 100 , but in 2019 the song took the No. 1 spot on the chart on its 25th release.

In 2021, the song earned the number 1 spot on Billboard ‘s “100 Greatest Songs of All Time” chart .

Recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records with 3 records

In 2019, All I Want for Christmas Is You received the Guinness World Records title.

Mariah Carey received the Guinness World Records title for “All I Want for Christmas Is You”. Photo: DENISE TRUSCELLO / GETTY
Specifically, Carey’s hit holds the record in the Holiday Song (Christmas/New Year) categories with the highest ranking on the Billboard Hot 100 by a solo artist; Most-streamed track on Spotify in 24 hours (female) and track with most weeks in the Top 10 singles chart for a Christmas song in the UK.

” All I Want for Christmas Is You ” was written quite quickly

This song was co-written by Carey with her then-collaborator Walter Afanasieff.

Although it has long been reported that the song took only 15 minutes to write, Carey later revealed to Parade that the writing time was a bit longer than that.

“I started writing it on a little DX7 or Casio keyboard in a small room in the house I was living in at the time in Upstate New York,” she explains.

Mariah Carey. Ảnh: TERENCE PATRICK/CBS VIA GETTY
Just write down everything that comes to mind. All the things that remind me of Christmas I want others to feel the festive spirit too.”

Although the song was written quite quickly, the recording process took longer.

“It took us a little bit of time to record it because if you listen to all those background vocals and everything that’s in the song, you’ll see that all of that couldn’t have been done,” Carey said. in 5 minutes unless you have three choirs”.

At first I didn’t want to sing ” All I Want for Christmas Is You”

Prior to the release of All I Want for Christmas Is You, Carey had only released two albums and believed it was too early in her recording career to release Christmas music.

But then Carey said in an interview with the Bobby Bones Show that because she loves Christmas, she decided to try her hand at this song.

However, the song’s co-writer Walter Afanasieff did not think the song would become the hit it is today.

Afanasieff doubted the song’s success at the time of its release because releasing Christmas music was not as popular among pop artists as it is today.

When Billboard asked Afanasieff in 2014 if he thought All I Want for Christmas Is You would be the album’s biggest hit, he flatly said “no.”

“Twenty years ago, Christmas music and Christmas albums by artists weren’t as big a deal as they are today,” Afanasieff explains.

Back then, there weren’t many artists with Christmas albums, back then no one was composing new and epic Christmas songs.”

Mariah Carey’s 2019 music video for “All I Want for Christmas Is You”. Photo: YouTube
Afanasieff also added: When you listen to the song, it sounds like there’s a live orchestra playing the iconic chords and melody accompanied by Carey’s vocals, but according to Afanasieff, the song was never recorded with a band.

“There’s never been a version of All I Want for Christmas Is You with a band. We tried it but it didn’t sound good.

I think when I listen to this song it has to be brighter, happier and more than what I think a Christmas song should be on the radio.

So I kept all the synthesizers/sequencers, the computer-composed parts,” Afanasieff told Variety in 2019.

Photo: APPLE TV+
Because the song was recorded in August, Carey felt it was necessary to decorate the studio in the most appropriate Christmas atmosphere.

“The studio looked like Christmas. The temperature was very cold. There were decorations, there were Christmas trees, there were Christmas candles” – producer Randy Jackson said in the documentary Mariah Carey Is Christmas: The Story of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ by Amazon Music.