Defrosting Mariah Carey: On Holidays, Traditions, and Pop Songs
If you’ve been to a party recently, or perhaps at a small food place where they play music, or lived long enough on this Earth, then you’ll know exactly what I mean by “All I Want For Christmas is You”. The origin of this meme is well-known - and honestly, where else could it have been born but from the bowels of Twitter? The best part of this entire joke, really, is the fact that Mariah Carey leaned into it, when she posted a music video of herself being defrosted from a block of ice singing the ubiquitous song.
Right, so why do we care?
Even with all the jokes, and the occasional scoff of disdain at Mariah’s trilling notes, society has yet to phase out this song and leave it forever in the past. The thing about Christmas is that it is a holiday with its own repertoire of songs: melodies that you recognize, from “Jingle Bells”, “I Saw Mommy Kiss Santa Claus”, and of course, “All I Want For Christmas is You”. Even orchestral arrangements feature these familiar tunes, like Larry MacTaggart’s “Laughing All The Way”. Think of a Christmas song - any Christmas song, really - and wonder if you know anyone who doesn’t know it, or at the very least, has never heard the melody before. “Carol of the Bells”, “Silent Night”, “Frosty the Snowman”, “Silver Bells”, “Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer”, and so on, and so forth…
The point here, though, is that in this annual block of songs, “All I Want For Christmas is You” is a pop song. You don’t see a lot of pop songs in the holiday collection, if any at all. Not that Mariah herself is the first and only pop singer to give in to the Christmas cheer; we have Ariana Grande and Elizabeth Gillies’ rendition of “Chestnuts Roasting On an Open Fire” or Owl City’s “Kiss Me Babe, It’s Christmas Time”. None of these songs have reached the cultural level of “All I Want for Christmas is You”, though, and it’s something worth sparing a little thought about.
Christmas is marked by the shift in the music that plays on the radio. We go from top hits to top Christmas hits in less than a day, and no one bats an eye, we all just go online to post memes about it. We share laughs over Mariah Carey’s defrosting as if it was a part of Christmas tradition for those who celebrate it, as normal and representative of the season as gingerbread cookies and decorated pine trees.
I think that’s funny. You never know what will catch on. The zeitgeist moves in mysterious ways. But more than that, we change constantly, seemingly in cycles, with up and down and sideways on this one-way track called life. One moment, you’re listening to a new pop song on the radio going “Cool!” at all the thrilling high notes and in a couple of years you don’t even think twice at its appearance on the radio. One moment, we’re celebrating the “season of joy” in the cold damp darkness of winter, and the next, we’re forgetting all about it in warm sunny days and summer flings.
We humans are a funny little bunch. Maybe we should strive to be more hamster instead.
