\n<\/p>\n
Before Carey’s tune registered, it had been a minute since a Christmas song was also a massive hit.<\/p>\n
If you count Wham!<\/strong>‘s mournful “Last Christmas” as a holiday staple, we’re talking 1984. If you prefer more pep in your reindeer’s step, Jose Feliciano<\/strong> first wished us “Feliz Navidad” in 1970.<\/p>\n John Lennon <\/strong>and Yoko Ono <\/strong>made their cultural mark with 1971’s “Happy Xmas (The War Is Over),” but that wasn’t a huge hit in the U.S. at first. And it’s more melancholy than merry, Carey herself calling it “pretty sad.”<\/p>\n Really not since Brenda Lee<\/strong>‘s 1958 banger “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (written by Johnny Marks<\/strong>) had there been such an upbeat addition to the canon that also sold millions of records. And suffice it to say, the Carey magic has not been replicated yet.<\/p>\n Comparing their song to “a cosmic occurrence that happens once every 5 billion years,” Atanasieff told Billboard <\/em>that “thousands of original Christmas songs have been written in the last 20 years…But for whatever reason ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ just became that<\/em> song.”<\/p>\n And, he noted, it “was the last major song to enter that Christmas canon, and then the door slammed shut. It just closed.”<\/p>\n