Mariah Careyis famously—some say fabulously—late.
It’s mid-November in Los Angeles. A cold front has lent a slight chill to the air, giving just enough permission for the sold-out stadium filled with Mariah Carey’s fans, known as Lambs, to don their gay apparel. Which is to say, thousands of Lambs are bundled up in various combinations of Christmas beanies, glowing Christmas-tree-bulb necklaces, Christmas sweaters and Mariah Carey-branded sweaters and sweatshirts. (Still Christmas-themed.)
She is the Queen of Christmas, after all. For years fans have said as much. Carey proclaims, “It’s…Time!” every year on Nov. 1, turning the seasonal colors from orange and black to red and green. She then presses play on her mega hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You”—her “love song for the holiday”—placing it back in our heads as a jingly, jangly, joyful earworm. For Lambs, the holiday anthem not only feels like Christmas, it’s a call to action. It’s a hymn, really. And on this night they are here to worship.
Last year be damned. It was right around this time in 2022 that, in a move Lambs found collectively dour (one termed it more specifically a “hate crime”), the Federal Trademark BoardformallydeniedCarey the title of Queen of Christmas. But looking out at the crowd, I am not sure even the U.S. government could deny the palpable, unanimous opinion: Mariah Careyisthe Queen of this season. (Dolly Parton says so, it should be noted.) And, if not ofChristmas,then perhaps, well, let’s just say Mariah Carey is the Queen of All Things Festive. Period.
She also knows how to deliver a Christmas miracle. At exactly 8:30 the lights dim. An enormous bow-wrapped package is wheeled to center stage. The opening orchestral arrangement chords of Carey’s contribution to the holiday begins.
“All I want for Christmas isyou, Mariah!” a fan screamed next to me, Mariah’s wide smile and the words “It’s Time!” spread across his chest. “She saves my Christmas,” he says to his friend sitting next to him. “Every year.”
The present spins around. There she is.
“I think we could all use a little joy, especially right now,” she tells the crowd, with wide eyes and a serene smile, the look on her face somewhere between archangel Gabriel and the Elf on the Shelf.
Nino Munoz
A week earlier, Carey is running late.
Inside an L.A. photo studio “We Belong Together,” one of her No. 1 hits that spent 14 weeks at the top in 2005, booms through the vast space. Fake snow flutters to the ground.
“Years? What are years?” she asks me sincerely, albeit with a twinkle in her eye. She’s 54, it bears noting. “I’m unfamiliar with them.” Touching up her cheeks with blush (Milani rose powder in “Coral Cove,“if you’re wondering) her longtime makeup artist Kristofer Buckle bites his lip to suppress a giggle.“For the Charlie Brown tree, we do Polaroids of ourselves and put them on the tree. And it’s fun because it’s a sad little tree, but we decorate it, and it’s cute, and it’s got the colorful lights. And every year I try to save ornaments my fans have made for me, so we put them up on that tree as well.”“But I’m not with my trees now.” She’s on the road. For many years her annual Christmas concert was mostly limited to New York City and Las Vegas. This year she’s taking it national for the first time, with a 14-city tour.“I’ve been working day and night on this one,” she says. “I worked with some incredible people on this, like Miss Debbie Allen.” TheFameicon, 73, served as creative director and choreographer on the tour. “I’ll be doing songs I’ve never done before, some duets.” She smiles a slight grin. “I’ve got to keep some surprises.”Spoiler alert: Two surprises are the addition of a pair of high-profile cast members to the repertory company. Her 12-year-old twins,Moroccan and Monroe(whom she shares with ex-husbandNick Cannon), are performing with her. It’s somewhat of a full-circle Christmas moment, given that she was pregnant with the twins when she wrote one of her favorite holiday songs, 2010’s“Christmas Time Is in the Air Again.”
She begins to recite the lyrics of her song.
Even Old Scrooge makes a Christmas wishFor a honey to hold Christmas dayAnd to feel love like ours always
Carey wrote the ballad with theHairspraycomposer and lyricist Marc Shaiman. “He’s very Broadway. I don’t want to put him in just one category. But he’s very strict with the way he writes. So I really enjoyed that process.” She dips back into the song:
Mr. Grinch simply can’t resistWarming up when he looks our way
“That was us,” she laughs at the songwriting memory. “I was pregnant, and that was us really just focusing and having a great time creating what turned out to be one of my favorite Christmas songs that I’ve ever written. Marc and I wrote the lyrics and everything together, so that was a great experience. Some people I can’t do that with, but with him, it was great.”Carey beams with pride when asked about being on stage with her newest coworkers. She’s not sure if her kids will be performers later in life, but she is enjoying sharing the stage now.“As they grow up and decide what to do with their lives, it’s really nice for me to be able to see them performing onstage.” Carey says she doesn’t want to speak too much for them, wanting to letRoc and Roe, as she calls them, be their own people. “I even like watching them getting ready, preparing to perform. Tonight, before I left the house, my son was practicing on something he’s doing for the show.” During the show Roc raps during “Here Comes Santa Claus,” and Roe sings with her mom on “Jesus Born on This Day.”Of course, she’s not always her kids’ costar. She’s also Mom while on the road. “We’re going to see how I juggle those two responsibilities,” she says with a shrug. She pauses.“I don’t know. Just everybody has to do what their jobs are. If their job is to go to school for three hours a day, they have to go to school for three hours a day. And if their job is also being on stage and being a part of the show, then they have that.” She takes a deep breath. “Part of my job is to rest and relax and know, ‘OK, everybody’s got this covered, and I’m going to get out there and perform.’”
InWhy Mariah Carey Matters, writer Andrew Chan’s examination of Carey’s creative evolution, published earlier this year, he posits thusly:
“Extreme talent begets extreme mythology—and as (unproven) legend would have it, Mariah hits the notes only dogs can hear, the notes that shatter glass, the notes that she says once opened a fan’s garage door. But of the handful of American pop singers who have been treated with this degree of relevance, few are celebrated for their artistry outside the vocal booth. Indeed, few can claim to have written all their signature songs, produced and arranged for other artists and directed several of their own music videos, as Mariah has. It has always been easier for the casual listener to assume Mariah is an interpreter of material rather than the auteur behind it.”I’m thinking about this passage as Careyimprovises a song about mopping. While she mops the stage floor. In the middle of her concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Let me explain.Carey’s “Merry Christmas One and All!” concert is a tidy 90-minute affair. Over the course of 27 songs and medleys, she does four costume changes, sings with her two kids, celebrates both a secular and a religious view of Christmas—at one point, while in an iridescent robe and gold starburst crown, she resembled a Renaissance version of both Jesusandthe Mother Mary—and effortlessly dips in and out of hits such as “Honey” and “We Belong Together” before ending in a rousing, swelling,All together now!version of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
“I better mop too,” she sings, after identifying the spill on the floor as “hair grease.”“In case someone says, ‘She was too good to mop.’ ” The crowd laughs, but Carey laughs louder. “It’s really easy if you try!” she belts.Buckle calls me later. He’s been her makeup artist “since herButterflyalbum.” Apparently this is how he keeps time with her, respecting Carey’s seeming allergy to the Gregorian calendar. “She understands that people see her a certain way,” he says of her playful if diva-ish act onstage. He’s speaking sotto voce upstairs on Carey’s tour bus as they drive to Kansas City just before Thanksgiving. “She gets it. Like, the joke is always hers.”
Buckle, who works with her for stage, shoots and events, compares her to an Old Hollywood star (one who’ll cook collard greens for the crew on Thanksgiving Day, Buckle reports). “She always looks likeMariah. Her stage persona is not a character; this is who she is. But she wants to bring fans what they expect. She wants them to have the full experience if they’re going to see her.”So that’s big eyes—she has named the different looks, say “Bambi” or “Jasmine”—and a muted mouth, to keep the “focus on her words.” And, to be clear Buckle confirms, she’salwaysin heels.“She doesn’t own sneakers,” he says with a laugh. “They give her a blister within two minutes. It’s probably her aversion to artificial materials. This sounds so cliché, but she’s very much like a Barbie. Like a human Barbie doll. Like even when she’s not wearing shoes, her foot is shaped like a high heel. She’s up on her toe, and she’s in a full arch.”
It’s got her signature butterfly ring.
There are painted nails. The hair is cascading, and her smile is wide and knowing. The Mariah Barbie is not as much holding a mic as much as it’s affixed to her hand.“As a little girl, I didn’t have a lot of toys or things,” Carey says, remembering her at-times tough childhood, growing up in a small house in Long Island with her mom, Patricia Carey, an opera singer. “The one thing I really wanted was Superstar Barbie.”
She eventually would get one of the feather boa-ed dolls—more than one, actually.“When I first started working with the people at Barbie, they sent me a bunch of Superstar Barbies, and it was really sweet,” she says. Still, Carey had some feedback for Mattel.
With her own doll,she joins the ranks of other icons who have been Barbie-ized:Beyoncé,Tina Turner,Stevie NicksandCher. “Can we talk about the word ‘diva’ for a second?” I ask Carey.“Why not?Everybody else does,” she says quickly, with a chuckle.Carey mostly embraces the word, she says. As do her fans. “I still define the word ‘diva’ the way it is in the dictionary.” She asks me if I have a dictionary on hand—I do not—but she doesn’t need to look it up.
At the end of the Hollywood Bowl concert,
which ended before the 11 p.m. curfew, Carey stood on the stage with her children Roc (his cap ID’d him as such) and Roe. Mom was dressed as a very sparkly, if pantless, nutcracker.
Mariah Carey on Tour.Kevin Mazur/WireImage for MC
Kevin Mazur/WireImage for MC
“It’s like looking into a snow globe,” she says of her curtain call each night. “There are so many races, creeds, colors, age groups out there in the audience, having fun, living their best lives and singing along with each other.” It’s clear that it’s in these moments of connection where Carey receivesherjoy.Says Buckle, who has watched her holiday shows for 20 years now: “Mariah believes in this as much as anyone. More, actually. There’s something about everyone coming together for the simple reason of having a good time and experiencing joy that magically, feels like a collective prayer for peace. A bunch of people collectively pooling their energy for fun and goodness and hope.”As much as Carey jokes about (and Lambs celebrate her for) unthawing,breaking from ice, or returning from the sea for her “return” every Nov. 1, the holiday spirit is really not a joke to her. Sheisthe holiday.
“Look,” Carey says, as she stands up in the studio and prepares to get home to her kids, “come hell or high water, this year, this Christmas, we are going to have fun.”
Credits
Photographer:Nino Muñoz
Cinematographer:Eric Longden
Stylist:Wilfredo Rosado
Prop Stylist:Keith Boos
WARDROBE
Red LookDress: Alexander McQueen, Shoes: Christian Louboutin, Earrings: Loree Rodkin
Gold LookDress: Celine, Shoes: Alaïa
Sweater LookSweater: Bottega Veneta, Shoes: Alexander McQueen, Jewelry: Loree Rodkin
Faux Fur LookFaux Fur: Saulo Villela for Pologeorgis, Jewelry: Hamilton Jewelers Private Reserve 18K White Gold & Fancy Shape Necklace
source: people.com
