As we write, we are a day away from Christmas, and chances are good that you’ve been hearing Christmas music for several weeks now. There are some terrific songs on the airways, and in our opinion, one of the better “new” ones is, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey. Scroll down to hear it (again):
We put quotation marks about “new” because, if you can believe it, Mariah Carey first released this song 25 years ago. That we think it’s one of the best Christmas songs released isn’t just our opinion; the song has amassed more than 550 million views on YouTube for its wintry home movie-style video, and nearly 510 million plays on Spotify. In fact, last Christmas Eve, it broke Spotify’s then-record for the most-played song in 24 hours with 10.8 million streams.
“All I Want” (which Mariah Carey co-wrote with Walter N. Afanasieff) only continues to grow in popularity: Early this year, the song reached a new peak of No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, and according to Billboard, it became the first holiday song in nearly 60 years to crack the Top 5. Of the process of writing the song, Carey has said, “I wrote the melody and lyrics; he [Walter] played and did additional writing, which is great, but it’s my baby. It was my thing…When we got together, I was like, ‘You know, I think it should start out slow, and then the music should come in and sort of have a Jackson 5, Phil Spector-type moment,’ if that makes sense. It was inspired by those songs from the ’50s and ’60s.”
And speaking of the 60’s, if you are of a certain age, chances are also good that one of your favorite Christmas songs was performed by the Ray Conniff Singers. Nearly 50 years after the group’s last recording, their Christmas songs are traditional favorites heard at the mall, on the radio, and in stores. The video below is, by today’s standards, corny. It was a simpler, far more different time, but the music holds up:
Photo of Ray Conniff and his Poodle is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
