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All I Want for Christmas Is You
"All I Want for Christmas Is You," written and recorded by Mariah Carey with co-writer Walter Afanasieff and released in 1994, became the most successful and commercially significant Christmas song of the modern pop era, eventually reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 2019, 25 years after its original release. Recorded at Right Track Recording studio in New York City, the song combined Carey's vocal range with a deliberately vintage, 1960s girl-group-inspired production style, giving it a nostalgic sonic quality despite being written and recorded decades after that era's peak. The song's enormous and continuing annual streaming and sales resurgence every holiday season, decades after its release, has made it one of the most consistently lucrative recordings in modern music, generating an estimated multi-million-dollar royalty windfall for Carey and her co-writer every year. Its combination of its unprecedented modern commercial success and its status as the definitive contemporary pop Christmas song has made "All I Want for Christmas Is You" the most significant Christmas song written in the last half-century.
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Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane for the 1944 MGM musical film "Meet Me in St. Louis," introduced a more bittersweet, melancholy emotional register into the Christmas song canon, reflecting the film's wartime-era themes of family separation and uncertainty. Judy Garland, who performed the song in the film, reportedly requested that Martin soften the song's originally even bleaker draft lyrics, resulting in the more hopeful, though still wistful, version that became the standard recorded by countless subsequent artists. Frank Sinatra's later 1957 re-recording, for which he specifically requested Martin revise a lyric he felt was too melancholy for his own album, produced the somewhat more upbeat alternate version of certain lines that many contemporary performers now use interchangeably with Garland's original. Its combination of its distinctively bittersweet emotional tone and its dual iconic Garland and Sinatra recordings has made "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" one of the most emotionally complex and enduringly reinterpreted songs in the Christmas canon.
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