Mariah Carey’s rendition of her holiday classic All I Want for Christmas is You during Netflix’s coverage of the NFL on Christmas Day was absolutely stunning.
The iconic songstress was dressed in a striking red bodysuit adorned with gold epaulettes and buttons, which she stylishly paired with black boots and a flawless blowout.
She shot the spot on a rooftop decorated to look like a winter wonderland high above the Los Angeles skyline.
The video cut between shots of the Kansas City Chiefs and Pittsburgh Steelers as well as people festively celebrating at home and in a bar.
‘This Christmas, we all get our wish,’ Carey said in a video when her performance was first announced by Netflix earlier this month.
‘The NFL is live on Netflix — and I’ll be there, too.’
This special performance was pre-recorded and coincided with the milestone of All I Want for Christmas is You reigning at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts for 17 weeks, marking a new record for Mariah Carey.
She shared the post Billboard made to her Instagram Stories and made sure to let her fans know how grateful she is for this honor.
‘This is amazing!!!! Will never ever ever ever ever take this for granted. Merry early Christmas!!!!’
The holiday classic debuted in 1994 and the craziest thing about the song is that the self-professed Queen of Christmas didn’t set out to write a holiday song, let alone an enduring classic.
Mariah was married to Sony Music executive Chairman Tommy Mottola at the time and coming off her massive hit album Music Box. It was Mottola’s idea to follow her successful third pop album up with a Christmas album.
Mariah was adamantly opposed to the idea. She felt that a Christmas album was something an artist did at the end of their career, not at the beginning.
It felt desperate at worst and extremely strange at best for Mariah’s next album to be a Christmas album, but Mottola insisted.
And he didn’t want an album full of covers of classic Christmas songs, he wanted at least one original new Christmas song.
When she and her co-writer Walter Afanasieff reluctantly got to work, they spent less than 15 minutes on both the lyrics and melody.
In the summer of 1994, they began putting together an album that eventually would be titled Merry Christmas.
In August 1994 Mariah and Walter started playing around with a ‘boogie woogie, rock and roll’ riff (as he would later describe it). Mariah came up with some lyrics off the top of her head.
Less than 15 minutes later, they had composed the lyrics and music for what eventually became All I Want For Christmas is You.
And while Mariah’s marriage to Mottola ended acrimoniously, she has him to thank for the bulk of her wealth.
His idea to record a Christmas album, and have one original song on it, translates to $600,000 in royalties every December on the low end. On the high end, it brings in $1.2 million.
Annually, the song nets Mariah $2-$4 million every year.
To date, All I Want for Christmas has generated at least $80 million in overall royalties. As the song’s co-writers and co-producers, Mariah and Walter enjoy the bulk of that revenue, Celebrity Net Worth reported.
All I Want for Christmas is You is also the first holiday song to reach two billion streams on Spotify.
‘This is beyond incredible. I’m honored to have ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ be the first holiday track on Spotify to reach 2 Billion Streams!
I’m so grateful to all Spotify listeners around the world who’ve made the song part of their holiday tradition year after year,’ Carey told People in a Dec. 13. statement.
All these accolades and the end of her Christmas Time tour ensure Mariah will have a very Merry Christmas.
