Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ Inducted Into Library Of Congress Recording Registry

Mariah Carey was just bestowed the honor of a lifetime, after her 1994 classic "All I Want For Christmas Is You" was among the 25 songs selected this year for preservation by the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.

The 54-year-old singer reacted to the honor by taking to Twitter and subtweeting the 1-minute video of a Library of Congress official informing Carey of the honor. She tweeted, "I’m honored beyond belief! I definitely did not even imagine this would happen when writing and recording this song! Thank you so much Ms. Hayden and the @thelibraryofcongress."

In the video, Carey called the honor "incredible" while recalling the track's huge success all these years since its release.

"When I first wrote 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' everybody always asks me, 'Oh, did you know it was gonna be this big?' and the answer is always no," she said. "This is major. This is so gratifying to me as an artist. As a songwriter, of course. ... I had no idea [it would be this big]. I just wrote from my heart what I wanted. Thank you so much for including me in this incredible company."

Madonna's "Like a Virgin," Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina," The Four Seasons' "Sherry," John Lennon's "Imagine," and Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" are among the 25 songs selected for this year's class.

In selecting Carey's holiday classic, the Library of Congress described Carey this way:

"For the past 40 years, the lower rungs of the pop chart have been littered with attempts to launch a new Christmas standard, a song for the season to modernize the feelings that Bing Crosby and Mel Torme had so resoundingly put onto disc decades before. None of them had ever endured, however, nor taken their place with those previous hits and all the classic Christmas hymns and carols. That was until 1994 when, for her fourth collection, Carey went into the studio to make the now almost obligatory holiday album."

"For it, she laid down 10 songs, most of them holiday favorites like 'Silent Night' and 'Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,'" the entry continued. "But, in the mix, she and collaborator/producer Walter Afanasieff (a.k.a. Baby Love) also contributed this original tune. The song was first released in October 1994, but, now, almost like Christmas itself, the song comes back again and again; it continues to chart every year. In fact, each year since 2000, the song has even charted higher than the year before! 'All I Want…' has now gone 12 times platinum and is the best-selling holiday song ever recorded by a female artist."

It's almost a mystery how it took so long for Carey's Christmas classic to reach the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, a feat she accomplished in December 2019.

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