‘It’s Time!’ Mariah Carey Reflects on 30 Years as Queen of Christmas

When the record company came knocking, Mariah Carey wasn’t sure about making a Christmas album.

“I felt it was too early in my career,” she said in a recent interview, recalling the early ’90s.

But she had always loved Christmas, and so she got to work on arrangements for some of her favorite seasonal classics, like “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night,” and filled her recording studio with vibrant decorations like trees and lights. All she and her writing partner Walter Afanasieff needed were some original songs.

Then one late night, she recalled, the distinctive opening melody line of one song came to her as she tapped it out on a small Casio keyboard — “ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding,” she sang over Zoom. For the lyrics, she said, she racked her brain for something that felt meaningful. Then, “I started thinking about: ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas.’”

Thirty years after its release in 1994, that song, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” has become one of the longest-charting singles in any genre, spending 65 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100, and perhaps the best-known original holiday song of the last half-century. The album, “Merry Christmas,” has sold 18 million copies and would become synonymous with the season, blasting from cars, mall speakers and party playlists, and cementing Carey’s role as the Queen of Christmas. And the season? Well, that begins on Nov. 1 — when Carey has declared, “It’s time.”

Carey spoke with The New York Times ahead of a 21-date holiday tour that starts this month. It comes as she is teasing new, non-Christmas music, in what would be her first studio album in six years.