For almost 30 years, the Christmas season has been synonymous with listening to Mariah Carey and her song ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, released in 1994. So impactful has that song become that it is the first and only Christmas single to be certified Diamond, and 25 years later, in 2019, it reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 for the first time.

But why has Carey become so identified with the holiday season? What is the reason she loves Christmas so much? She confesses it herself: having had a tough childhood.

Christmas means joy for the multi-Grammy winner

“When you grow up with a messy life and then you’re able to have this transformation where you can make your life what you want it to be, that’s joy to me,” she told W magazine.

“That’s why I want my kids to have everything they can have. I want them to be able to understand that they can be anything they want to be.”

She added that she didn’t always feel happiness as a child, which is why she is now often very festive or, as she has dubbed herself, the Queen of Christmas.

“People think I had this princess-style life or whatever, a sort of fairy-tale existence where I just emerged, like, ‘Here I am!’ And that’s not what it is,” she explained.

She had an upbringing marked by violence

In her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” Mariah talked about her violent upbringing, and the angry outbursts of her older brother, Morgan, who would hurt their mom to such a degree that the police had to be called.

“Choking back tears, I did my best to calmly tell her, ‘My brother really hurt my mom, and I’m home alone. Please come and help,'” she wrote. “One of the policemen, looking at me but talking to another policeman next to him, said, ‘If this girl pulls through, it will be a miracle.’ And that night, I became less of a girl and more of a miracle.”

She also suffered abuse from her older sister, Alison, who drugged her with Valium when she was 12.