Mariah Carey’s 1994 holiday classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is always unavoidable, a side-effect of it being the most popular Christmas song since “O Tannenbaum” set the world on fire in the 1800s, but it has apparently been slightly more unavoidable this year—at least according to the Billboard charts.
As of this week, “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has hit number one on the Top 100 list for the third time, making this the first time that any one song has hit the top of Billboard’s charts in three separate runs. In other words, the song didn’t go up to number one, then drop to number two, then get back to number one. It started outside of the 100 and then got up to number one three times.
The Billboard website has some more info on the particulars of this record and the various rules around it, and it also explains that the previous record was set by Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”—which should give you some indication of how difficult this was. It hit number one in 1960, then again in 1962, and never again after that (he should really be trying to get “The Twist” over to whoever comes up with TikTok dances).
“All I Want For Christmas Is You,” meanwhile, hit the Hot 100 charts for the first time in 2017, then hit number one in 2019, 2020, and now 2021. It’s clearly not slowing down at all, so it will probably break this record next year and then the year after that… unless Mariah Carey can convince people to make “All I Want For Christmas Is You” into a year-round song. Then it can just stay on the charts and play on the radio and on the speakers in stores forever!