Mariah Carey Will Wish ‘Merry Christmas to All!’ in Prime-Time Holiday Special

Mariah Carey is bringing her Christmas cheer directly into your house this season. The singer announced on Thursday (Nov. 10) that she will sled through all her holiday favorites on Dec. 20 during an all-new two-hour primetime special, Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All!, slated to air on CBS and Paramount+.

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The announcement came during an appearance on CBS Mornings on Thursday, where MC dropped by to promote her first-ever yuletide picture book, The Christmas Princess, as well to explain why she just can’t get enough of mistletoe and eggnog season. The special will be filmed at Carey’s upcoming two-night “Merry Christmas to All!” stand at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Dec. 13 and 16; she will also bring the show to Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on Dec. 9 and 11.

With one of the most enduring modern Christmas classics of all time in “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” Mariah was asked if she feels like she has to continually up her holiday game in order to retain her Christmas Queen crown and whether she thinks the slow-rolling retail cheer creep is getting out of hand. “It is too early! Tell that to the stores,” she said about the slow Santa slide that finds some big box outlets pre-stocking jingle trinkets before the Halloween haunts even have left stores.

“Honestly, I think we need to get through Thanksgiving,” Carey added about when she thinks it’s appropriate to rev up our Rudolph game. And not for nothing she noted, her signature “it’s time” tweets were not originally her doing, but American Idol host Ryan Seacrest’s. “It was Ryan Seacrest, I believe, tweeted me and he said, ‘Hey Mariah, I wanna get festive, I wanna get into the holiday spirit. Do you think it’s time?,'” she recalled. “And I thought it was really funny, and I’m like, ‘not yet.’ So then we just started filming people asking me, or I’d be in the dentist chair [and they’d ask] ‘should we put Christmas music on for you?'”

Carey said she was super proud that her first announced “Merry Christmas To All!” show at MSG sold out in an hour. “I have no words,” she said, teasing that there will be a few “new sections” of the show she last performed in 2019, including fan requests of songs she hasn’t performed in the holiday showcase yet.

Check out Mariah’s announcement and interview below.

Gil Kaufman

Billboard