More Than You Could Ever Know

It happened at 9:50AM this morning.

I was checking out my groceries at the Key Food on Third Avenue in Bay Ridge when I heard Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” for the first time this year.

Never mind Black Friday sales or card shop displays, the holiday shopping season doesn’t start for me until I hear this 1994 song—though it is surprisingly late this time out.

It’s the definitive sign that the holiday snowball has begun its downhill roll and there’s no way to stop it.

And I’m a bit ashamed to admit this but…I like “All I Want for Christmas is You.”

There, I said it. I feel so much better now.

Yes, I know the song is roundly hated by all creatures great and small, and that it is considered the audio version of a lump of coal. But I can’t help it.

A 2019 survey in England named this tune as the most annoying holiday song ever.

A quick google search shows “All I Want for Christmas” making several “Most Hated Christmas Song” lists, joining the likes of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” “Santa Baby” and “Last Christmas.”

And I also know that the song has been hate-memed to hell and back.

For instance, there’s the one where Jack Nicholson--the song--is axing his way into the bathroom to get at a screaming Shelley Duvall--a stand-infor retail workers.

There’s an image of Henry Cavill labeled “Me, trying to enjoy my life,” seconds away from being bumrushed by a grinning Jason Momoa as the living embodiment of the song.

Then there’s a dude who represents “Retail workers trying to survive” getting bashed over the head with a Stop sign. The attacker is labeled “Mariah Carey” while his weapon of choice is branded as…well, take a guess.

The song has been depicted as train swiping a school bus, a truck about to run over a child, and has gotten the business with imagery from Star Wars and Game of Thrones. That’s an awful lot of animosity. Haven’t you people ever heard “Mamacita (Donde Esta Santa Claus?”)?”

My sister torments me with this song every year and I swear if you hear that one enough times and you’ll lose your fear of waterboarding.

You Find it Repulsive’

But it wasn’t always this way.

When was “All I Want for Christmas is You” was released on Oct. 29, 1994, The New Yorker said it was “one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon.” Now people want to fire it out of a cannon.

The tune was recorded in August of that year and took Carey and her songwriting partner Walter Afanasieff a total of 15 minutes to write and compose it.

The song, which comes off Carey’s “Merry Christmas” album, topped the charts in twenty-six countries including Australia, Canada, France and Germany.

I thought I’d try to track down the vitriol and I came across a found a Reddit page where someone wanted to know why the ditty was so thoroughly despised.

This person also very wisely begged people to be civil in their replies and thus probably saved himself from being boiled in his own pudding.

Here are some of the responses:

“Because after the movie ‘Love Actually’ came out it was played to death everywhere!” one person said. “Even now you can't go out in public anywhere post-Thanksgiving in the US and not hear the song over and over and over and over again.”

“I hear it fifteen times a day at the store where I work,” another one said. “It's like ‘Call Me Maybe’ except you're subjected to it seasonally, year after year after year.”

And still another commented complained about “that god awful opening.”

“Soon as I hear that slow singing of the main lyrics followed by the piano and jingle bells, I scramble for a mute button,” this individual said. “It just irritates me. It’s like Colonel Lanz said in ‘Inglorious Basterds’—‘You don’t really know why you hate it, all you know is that you find it repulsive.’ lol.”

However, it seems that “All I Want for Christmas is You” is not having a good year this year. An article in Marca, Spain’s national daily sports newspaper said the tune is hovering at No. 10 or below, according to Spotify and iTunes.

“On the iTunes album chart, for example, the album 'All I Want' is at No. 35, while on Spotify the Brenda Lee's clasic, 'Rockin Around the Christmas Tree' is at No. 3,” the article said.

So, you can handle that Brenda Lee clunker, but Mariah makes you mental? Oh, please…

Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.

I was able to find one pro-Mariah meme amid all the misery that features a strutting puffin boldly declaring “I actually enjoy All I Want for Christmas.”

You and me both, pal.