While Mariah Carey may have legally been denied the right to be the queen of Christmas, she’s not denying herself the right to allegedly alter the story that made her a Christmas queen in spirit. However, there may be a Scrooge or Grinch in the way of her festival tale. In an interview with Hot Takes and Deep Dives, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” co-writer Walter Afanasieff claims that Carey has changed the origins of the Christmas staple over the years to exclude his help. “When she started to hint at the fact that, ‘Oh, I wrote that song when I was a little girl!’ But why weren’t you saying that for 12 or 13 or 15 years prior to that? So it just sort of developed in her mind,” Afanasieff said. “She doesn’t play anything. She doesn’t play keyboard or piano. She doesn’t understand music, she doesn’t know chord changes and music theory or anything like that.”
Carey has several variations of how she came up with her most recognizable song; she told Billboard in 2017 that she wrote the song “basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard.” In another interview with Cosmopolitan and Amazon Music, she claims she turned on It’s A Wonderful Life to get into the Christmas spirit before heading to her keyboard to write the song. She briefly mentions Afanasieff in the Amazon Music interview, but she discusses him as someone she got into the studio with to form her track fully and not as someone who was the song’s equal collaborator from the beginning. Most recently, in her memoir, she said the song came from her “little girl’s spirit and those early fantasies of family, and friendship.”
In contrast to Afanasieff’s interview, Carey doesn’t claim to be an expert at playing the piano. It would also be unfair to discredit her musical ability and knowledge; after all, she grew up with a mother who was a professional opera singer. Music has been a part of her entire life. Carey’s been co-producing her own music since before she was signed to Columbia records, before she had the help of the music industry. Lastly, Afanasieff forgets the most important piece of the puzzle: Mariah Carey is and has always been 12 years old; therefore, she was a little girl when she wrote the song. A Christmas miracle for the queen of Christmas!
