Mariah Carey opens for Christmas NFL games

Mariah Carey brought plenty of holiday cheer by kicking off the NFL’s Christmas Day games with a performance of his seasonal hit.

Grammy winner, 55, opened both games – Kansas City Chiefs vs. Pittsburgh Steelers at 1:00 pm ET and Baltimore Ravens vs. Houston Texans at 4:30 pm ET, streaming on Netflix – with a taping of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” Wednesday, December 25. Carey was shocked red sequin body in a rooftop performance, flanked by dancers dressed as Nutcrackers.

“All I Want for Christmas Is You” was released 30 years ago as the lead single from Carey’s first holiday album in 1994. Merry Christmas. Three decades later, the song continues to dominate the charts and has been certified 16 times platinum, making it the highest-certified single ever by a female artist.

In November, Carey reflected on the song’s origins in an interview ABC News.

“I was working alone… on this little Casio keyboard and writing words and thinking, ‘What do I think about Christmas? What do I love? What do I want? What do I dream about?'” he recalled. “And that’s how it started.” .

While working on the track, Carey hoped it would become a holiday classic.

“My goal was to make something timeless, so it didn’t feel like the ’90s, which is when I wrote it,” he added.

Now, 30 years later, the song is still one of the most popular songs of the season, which Carey attributed to the fact that she “really, really” loves Christmas. “It’s not fake,” he insisted.

Despite his true love for the holiday, in an interview in November The New York Times Carey revealed that her 1994 Christmas album almost didn’t happen.

“I felt it was too early in my career,” he told the outlet.

Eventually, Carey’s love for the holiday won out and she eventually became known as the Queen of Christmas.

This year, Carey upped the ante for the season by embarking on 16 dates. Merry Christmas and everyone’s tourHe made several stops across the United States and Canada from November 15 to December 17. (His 2023 holiday tour in Toronto and New York City included a total of four shows.)

Related: Let Bleachers, Megan Moroney and more elevate your 2024 holiday playlist

Mariah Carey has already decked out her halls, but plenty of other musicians are getting into the spirit of the season with original holiday songs this year. Jack Antonoff’s band, Bleachers, released a single called “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call” in November. The producer revealed the inspiration behind the song in a lengthy Instagram post (…)

“Last year we didn’t go, say, across the country,” he told ABC News. “So we’re doing that this year.”

Carey hoped the tour would give her fans a “merry Christmas” and allow them to enjoy “being together”.

He continued to tease that new music is “on the horizon,” saying he’s recently been “writing new songs” and spent time in the studio “working on something with a choir.”