Why Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas is You' became so popular — and stayed that way

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12:37 AM on Monday, December 11, 2023

By DAVID BAUDER

NEW YORK (AP) — “All I Want for Christmas is You,” Mariah Carey’s hit from 1994, has grown over the last three decades into the Christmas colossus. It’s arguably the most successful holiday song ever from an economic standpoint. Just try to avoid it if you go out in public. Her wish for a certain someone as her Christmas present is almost genetically engineered to be a smash hit, a musicologist explains, and has only grown in stature with the passing years. Yet it’s not a straightforward story. There’s a mystifying feud between the people who wrote it, and it’s the subject of a new lawsuit from authors of a country song with the same title