A way of getting into the holiday spirit (but only if you want to)
Mariah Carey's Magical Christmas Special
If you are someone who celebrates Christmas, it is officially that time of year again: twinkling lights have gone up on houses and in shop windows, innocent trees have been felled and moved in doors, and chances are your playlists now include a little Nat “King” Cole or Brenda Lee alongside Megan Thee Stallion or “Dicked Down in Dallas.” Either conventional wisdom or late capitalism (or both!) mandate that Christmas must begin sometime during the wee hours of November the first and last at least until that ball drops in Times Square two months later, so if it seems like the holiday has already been going on for a while now, it might be because each year it seems to arrive earlier: no sooner have we spit out our Dracula fangs or shed our alien masks and sexy kitten ears than we’re slipping into our gayest apparel and streaming “All I Want for Christmas is You”. It’s the biggest holiday of the year in America—culturally and economically—and it feels like it: between all the televised tree lighting ceremonies and the proliferation of gift giving guides, the Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays, the kooky sweaters and seasonal drinks, you’d think Christmastime itself represented the home-front effort in some war our men and women were fighting overseas. Yesterday, I saw a Jeep Cherokee wrapped in Christmas lights with an inflatable, panic-eyed Rudolph roped to the top. People—adults—standing around outside of a Starbucks cheered and shouted when it went by, Bing Crosby blaring from its speakers. We’re all just doing our part.
But it’s not for everyone, of course, and you don’t need a religious exemption to balk at the frenzy that overtakes all aspects of our culture this time of year. Maybe you find the decorations a little tacky or ostentatious. Perhaps you object to groups of strangers showing up uninvited on your doorstep to sing We Wish You a Merry Christmas in questionably arranged harmonies. There are any number of reason why Christmas might not be your thing, and even if it is your thing, there are any number of reasons why it might not feel like your thing in 2020. There’s a lot going on in the world, and if you aren’t naturally inclined toward festivity or trying your damndest, Christmas might seem like simply one more thing to contend with as we slough toward the end of this miserable year. This has certainly been my position, as someone who is, traditionally, neither particularly zealous about nor actively opposed to the holiday season. My personal relationship to Christmas is basically: I’d never decorate my own home (I don’t even have a tree) and, in the interest of consolidating the holiday as much as possible, I traditionally do most of my shopping in the last days before Christmas, but I’m perfectly happy to put on a Peanuts sweater and a good face at my mother’s on the 25th and fill myself with egg nog and those little wreath cookies you make with cornflakes, Red Hots, and green food coloring. I can get into the holiday spirit; I just like to wait until after Santa’s made his globular sojourn.
Imagine my surprise, then, when late last week, I began to feel some of those old seasonal urges, as recognizable as the early symptoms of a cold—a slight tickle in my nasal cavities, the beginnings of a sneeze. Maybe it was the holiday decorations that had gone up in the bookstore where I work, or the garland and lights the alderman’s office draped across the storefronts and twisted around the light poles on North Broadway. Maybe it was the men who arrived to sell Christmas trees in the parking lot of the elementary school I pass everyday, the thick scent of live pine, or the little Santa outfits people make their dogs wear. Or, maybe it was as simple as a 2020-induced craving for the protective nostalgia that is the (AHEM) hallmark of the holiday season, the return to childhood or happier times that, for some, Christmas symbolizes. Whatever the reason, I realized that, like the co-worker who showed up for her shift in a fleece romper printed with snowmen, or my neighbor, Matt, who struggled for hours with a coil of Christmas lights in his yard next door over the weekend, I wanted to feel the Christmas spirit. Understandably, this seemed like the tallest of orders. How to achieve, in the time of COVID, the cheer and enthusiasm that Christmas requires? Any feeling approximating joy has been but a distant notion for most of the past eight months, and the truth is, 2020 was shaping up to be pretty dismal even before the phrase “social distance” entered our lexicon and we started wearing masks. This year, trying to feel Christmas is like grasping for something in a dream, how your disobedient hands forever fumble the wanted object. All hope is not lost, though: here, I present you with a surefire way of getting into the Christmas spirit this year (but only if you want to).
Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special
Listen: my favorite thing about Christmas is Mariah Carey. For Lambs, there is no more joyous season. The reigning Queen of Christmas, she has taken the holiday and built it into her own personal cottage industry that includes two albums of original and traditional Christmas music, an annual stint of live holiday shows, a children’s book and animated film, a live-action holiday movie she both appeared in and directed, and, of course, as of last year, a Billboard Hot 100 number one single—her nineteenth—with her perennial classic “All I Want for Christmas is You,” the infectious and inescapable original carol she wrote in 1994. This season, capping off her thirtieth year in the business, she’s bringing her ultra-festive, glitter-covered brand of Christmas directly into your living room (which may also be your office-slash-classroom-slash-roomwherepanicoftheexistentialvarietyiscourted) with Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special, now streaming on Apple TV+. No one does Christmas quite like Mariah Carey, and the special is a whimsical, spirited dose of good, clean Christmas cheer wherein the songbird is summoned to the North Pole because Santa is worried that people aren’t feeling enough joy this season. How will he see to guide his sleigh if people are too deep in their COVID doldrums to bother putting up Christmas lights or trim their trees? Thus, Mariah is tasked with saving Christmas.
I daresay, she more than rises to the challenge. Across 45 minutes and not quite a dozen numbers, Carey is an effortlessly beguiling and ethereal presence, half superstar diva, half angelic Bearer of Glad Tidings of Great Joy. Like it’s main conceit, the special is both silly and self-aware, at once a spirited and sincere explosion of holiday fun and a canny comment on the festive turn Carey’s career has taken that works in large part because she never takes herself as seriously as she takes the holiday, or the work she puts into celebrating it. Also—and this is as important as it is expected—she serves look after look after look.
The soundtrack features mostly new performances of songs Carey has already recorded for her two previous Christmas albums, performances that respect where her voice is now while still paying homage to the epic scope of its prime. Voices, like people, age, and Carey, who is fifty, cannot be excepted to match the sheer magnitude of her deliveries of “O Holy Night” or “Joy to the World” from 1994, which have themselves become iconic, definitive versions of those classics. Her re-recordings strike a different, more intimate note, and are somehow more festive for it. In a segment from early in the special, Carey, in a glittery, plunging number that would flood Jessica Rabbit with envy, stands at a piano and sings “When Christmas Comes,” another of her originals, while Billy Eichner, who plays Santa’s head elf, watches from his perch on a comfy sofa. Aside from the pianist, Eichner is the only other person in the room, and it’s as if Carey is singing solely to him. It’s a cozy, indelibly Christmasy moment—the crackling fire, the snow piled outside the window—that, like her lovely and surefooted rendition of “Sleigh Ride,” new to the special, and a standout, is bound to bring cheer to even the Scroogiest of dispositions.
There are bigger numbers to follow, of course, set at various locations around this imaginary North Pole. Carey teleports Jennifer Hudson and Ariana Grande to Santa’s workshop to inspire the elves with a buoyant version of “Oh, Santa!” an original tune from 2010’s Merry Christmas II You. “Oh, Santa!” in which the narrator beseeches the titular subject to steal her back her man for Christmas, has a Motown girl-group vibe that is like a sped-up, more manic cousin to The Marvelette’s “Mr. Postman,” in the most perfect way. The addition of Hudson’s and Grande’s voices only further this track’s slightly deranged (again, IN THE MOST PERFECT WAY) quality, and you might’ve heard already about those harmonized whistle notes, which prove, if nothing else, that Mariah Carey, who produced the song, still knows how to craft a cultural moment.
With guest appearances and cameos from everyone from Bette Midler, Millie Bobby Brown, and Heidi Klum, to Snoop Dogg, Misty Copeland, Tiffany Haddish, and the Peanuts Gang, Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special truly is. Completely ridiculous and wholeheartedly extra, it is also warm, unexpectedly touching, and, frankly, highly entertaining. Watch it with a cup of hot cocoa while wearing the seasonal onesie pajamas your aunt bought you last year. You can even dust the windowsills with cotton balls for the full effect!
Happy Holidays, everyone!