Mariah Carey is many things to many people: mother, daughter, sister, lover, sartorial inspiration, meme-generator, icon. What she is not, however, is the “queen of Christmas.” Did you hear that? Are you paying attention, madam! Please do not call Mariah Carey the queen of Christmas.
How do I know personally that Mariah is not the queen of Christmas? For starters, I would never deign to assume a single freaking thing about Mariah Carey, including but not limited to whether or not she considers herself the queen of anything other than marabou feathers and daytime negligees. However, during a brief interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the following exchange occurred.
So now they seem to call you “the Queen of Christmas.”
“They.” I don’t know who “they” are. That is not my appellation.
You’re not thrilled with that title.
It’s not that I’m not thrilled. I just don’t think I deserve it. I’m just a person who likes Christmas, OK? Who happened to write some songs.
A fair number of websites have alluded to the fact that Mariah is indeed the “Queen of Christmas,” though, to her point, that “appellation” came without her consent. What even is the “Queen of Christmas”? Who is she? Where does she live? I assumed that the real queen of Christmas is Santa Claus—but seeing as both Santa and this bullshit monarchy are lies fed to two very different, gullible audiences, I’ll just let this live for now.
It must be noted that there is a compelling counterpoint to Maria’s claims that she is not the Queen of Christmas: a press release from December 2013, release announcing her “12 Days of Christmas” programming refers to the elusive chanteuse as the “ordained ‘Queen of Christmas.’” The press release does not provide any information as to who did the ordaining, though I’ll assume that it was a team of smooth-faced brand managers sitting in a conference room, riding out a sugar high induced by peppermint hot cocoa and pignoli cookies.
Regardless, Mariah Carey is a woman who likes Christmas. She wrote some songs. She wrote this song.
She made this teaser trailer and used the word “festivate” in the YouTube description box.
She sings a song in The Star, a movie about Bethelehem and the baby Jesus—and a movie in which Oprah Winfrey lends her voice to an animated camel named Deborah.
She embarks on a tour every year during which she only sings Christmas songs and she is responsible for one of the most extra renditions of “O Holy Night” that I have ever heard—a song that usually does not move me but makes my eyes fill with tears for reasons I cannot quite explain, somewhere around the 3:27 mark.
I’m not saying that Mariah Carey is the Queen of Christmas because the Queen of Christmas doesn’t exist—and if it did, it would be Santa Claus—but she’s something, all right.