Although Mariah Carey is not only known for her hit “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, it is still a milestone in her career. The fact that Christmas has a special meaning for the 52-year-old is not due to this success, but to her difficult childhood, as she explains in an interview.

Anyone who isn’t particularly interested in Mariah Carey’s music throughout the year can’t avoid her “All I Want For Christmas Is You” or the Wham! hit “Last Christmas” at Christmas. This is also due to the fact that the 52-year-old is a fan of the festival and for that reason alone she is very happy to produce music for it.

As she now tells in an interview with “W Magazine”, her love for the contemplative time goes much further. Christmas therefore has a special meaning for the singer. It “makes me happy. But people think I have a life like a princess or whatever, some sort of fairytale existence that I just popped out of and said, ‘Here I am!’ But that is not the case.”

Carey grew up in upstate New York with two siblings. Her father has Afro-American and Venezuelan roots, her mother is Irish, but the two divorced early on. In her childhood and adolescence, Carey was repeatedly exposed to racist hostility, which left its mark on her. She still feels like this lost child, “who needed a lot of nerves to believe that she could achieve anything in this world,” she said in 2019, among other things.

“But when you grow up with a messed up life and then have the opportunity to shape your life the way you want it? That’s joy for me,” she explains in an interview. “That’s why I want my kids to have everything they can have. I want them to understand that they can be anything they want to be.” Mariah Carey has 11-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe with ex-husband Nick Cannon. The couple has been divorced since 2016. Cannon is now a father of twelve.

However, the idea of ??making a Christmas album in 1994 came from her record company at the time. She told W Magazine: “It was very early in my career and I thought it was a bit early for me to do that, but I was like, ‘Well, I love Christmas.’ I had some very sad Christmases as a kid, but I always try to find the bright light in it.”

This year’s Advent season, however, Mariah Carey has more to do than just prepare for Christmas. She has joined New York’s Broadway as a co-producer of the musical Some Like It Hot. As the title (English: “Some Like It Hot”) suggests, it is an adaptation of the 1959 film of the same name starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. According to the organizer, the premiere should already be on December 11th.

(This article was first published on Tuesday, November 29, 2022.)