Mariah Carey’s  “All I Want for Christmas is You” plays every single year on repeat during December. What makes this song a holiday favorite?

Carey started out as a young artist, getting lucky enough for her audition tape to fall into the right hands, and soon she started working for her future husband, Tommy Mottola. Although they later divorced, Tommy loved Cary’s unique talents enough to immediately offer her a record deal. 

“There are the classics – the standards that everybody grew up with – and there are the reinterpretations or new originals,” senior analyst for Nielsen Music, Dave Bakula said. “Mariah lives in the sweet spot for both.” 

Mariah’s music incorporates many different genres of music, such as blues, gospel, and pop. This combined with “All I Want for Christmas is You,” which she wrote in 1994, brings back or creates many wonderful feelings for her audience. 

“It’s not only nostalgia for the holidays, which can be fraught from a lot of people, but for the ‘90s,” Assistant Music Professor at Northeastern University, Andrew Mall said. “This is an ongoing thing not only for people at the end of Gen X, but for millennials too.”

Despite the song’s untraditional melody, Mariah created the song “All I Want for Christmas is You” through her abundant love for the special winter holiday, noting that she has loved celebrating Christmas since she was a kid.

“It’s kind of amazing to me because I wrote it just out of love for Christmas,” Carey said in an interview with People’s magazine. “I just truly love holidays. I know it’s corny, and I don’t care.”

In order to make her song inclusive to everyone, Mariah seemed to make it a point that the song’s lyrics were not specified to a specific gender, making the song available for anyone to connect to. 

“It’s a love song actually,” Mall said. “Anyone can inhabit those lyrics; the lover is not named, the lover is not gendered, so anyone can put themselves in that position as needing someone to love at the holidays.”