A Decade of Mariah Carey's Christmas Shows
It has been exactly 10 years since Mariah Carey fully embraced her role as Christmas Queen.
“Thrilled” is a good way to encapsulate how I felt sitting in the audience at the Beacon Theatre 10 years ago on December 15, 2014. It was the first night of Mariah Carey’s Christmas residency at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, a series of shows that marked her very first Christmas concert open to the public and first full-length concerts in her hometown in almost half a decade. It was a truly special moment for me to see her at the Beacon, and it was a night when she seemed like she had something to prove, to fantastic results.
Seeing Mariah on stage at the Beacon held special significance for me because she was performing on that stage the very first time I became aware of her. In April 1998, VH1 held a benefit concert for their keep-music-programs-in-schools charity Save The Music. The assembled a squadron of tremendous female voices across genres and called the show VH1 Divas Live, which was broadcast live from, you guessed it, the Beacon Theatre. Mariah Carey was included among the ranks of a group of women deemed “divas,” alongside Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Shania Twain, and of course, Aretha Franklin (and Carole King as surprise guest diva).
I was barely 8 years old, but even then you couldn’t tell me that Aretha Franklin didn’t hang the moon. My parents taped Aretha’s parts and I watched them the next day. Between songs, Aretha went on a tangent about not getting to rehearse and how she hung out with her “newest girlfriend” in her trailer instead. During the tangent Aretha said “she’s gonna come out shortly and join me on stage,” and as the song began, Mariah carefully entered stage right. Their duet of Aretha’s “Chain of Fools” was electric. Her name was never mentioned until the end of the performance when, as they took a bow, Aretha said, “Miss Carey… Mariah.” I didn’t know her, but my 7-year-old brain applied some very sound logic to the moment: if this woman was singing with Aretha and was her newest girlfriend, I needed to know her. Thus began my journey into the music of Mariah Carey.
When Mariah announced that she’d be taking up residency at the Beacon, I didn’t want to go; it felt like I needed to go. I had to see Mariah on that stage of all stages; I simply couldn’t miss it. I’d also never seen a show at the Beacon before, and I couldn’t think of a better person to carry my first concert at a venue that held such foundational significance to my musical palette.
The evening also turned out to be of special significance to Mariah in a very different way. It was her first performance after the fallout from an off-night that just wouldn’t let up. A little over a week earlier, a debacle surrounding a performance Mariah gave at the Rockefeller Christmas Tree lighting led to isolated audio of her mic feed leaking online, supposedly in retaliation from the sound crew. She was not at her best, and it put her off-night under a microscope for the world to ridicule. When she took the stage at the Beacon, it felt like she was determined to make a point.
But it clearly takes a lot more than a bad day to halt the woman now known as the Queen of Christmas, especially during the Christmas season. 2014 marked the beginning of Mariah’s annual Christmas concerts that, along with growing brand partnerships, and a dedicated following to when she would mark the official beginning of the Christmas season, have become a guaranteed annual season of profitability for the most chart-successful female singer of the 1990’s.
For those who don’t remember, Mariah Carey and Christmas weren’t always synonymous. Though she released her first Christmas album Merry Christmas in 1994, and a second, Merry Christmas II You in 2010, Christmas was but a small piece of this mega-successful diva’s repertoire. Up until 2014, she’d never done a formal, full-length Christmas concert open to the public, save for a 7-song set (6 Christmas songs) during a benefit for the Fresh Air Fund at New York City’s St. John the Divine in 1994, and an ABC TV special recorded to promote her second Christmas album in Los Angeles in 2010.
A look at Mariah’s statistics for Christmas songs on setlist.fm, which aggregates concert setlists, might come as a surprise. Her inescapable, self-penned Christmas classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was exclusively performed in Japan until 2001, save for that aforementioned 1994 show. In fact, the year she’s performed the song the most is this one, 2024. So far she’s performed the classic 21 times this year, with 1-2 more performances slated.
To keep this quick: Billboard chart rules initially prevented the song from being Hot 100 fodder it has become, though it has topped the Billboard Holiday 100 for 62 (and counting) of the 70 weeks since the chart was introduced in 2011. A 2012 rule change allowed the song to appear on the Hot 100, and it became an annual fixture on the Hot 100. It finally cracked the top 20 in 2015, the top 10 in 2017, top 3 in 2018, and finally reached the summit in 2019. It’s returned there every year since then, setting records that make her as the only artist to reach that summit with the same song six separate times, and making her the only artist to notch a number one in four separate decades. It also continues to extend her record as the artist with the most weeks at the chart’s summit. In the coming years, more records will be set, extended, and broken. She’s reached a level of evergreen success that artists can only dream of, and the biggest brands from Amazon to Walmart to McDonalds have all lined up for a piece of Mariah at the holidays.
But back to 2014. Though she performed at a number of New York events, public and private, Mariah was elusive in concert from 2011-2013. She staged a Pacific Tour in the summer of 2014 which was met with mixed reviews, and performed at the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting less than two weeks prior to the Beacon kickoff. That performance, which took place a few days before the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, is a night that lives in infamy.
As the story goes, Mariah was locked in divorce negotiations with lawyers for her and soon-to-be ex-husband Nick Cannon. She was scheduled to pre-tape a performance, as is somewhat customary for the event. Reports indicated that she had a 7pm call time, but was stuck on the phone working out details of a component of her divorce, possibly custody of their twins. Fans and staff waiting eagerly in the not-so-ideal rain and 40ish degree winter for over 3 hours. When she finally showed up after 10pm ready to perform, she was sent home and it was decided that she would perform live the following night.
Mariah tweeted an apology the following morning and showed up ready to perform for the live broadcast the following night. Her lead vocal was mixed down, which is easy to pull off on “All I Want For Christmas Is You” because it hinges on layered vocals. However, everything fell apart quickly thereafter. The next morning, the isolated audio of her mic feed from the performance popped up online. It put the full scope of her off-night under a microscope for all to hear. Members of the event’s audio team were implicated in the leak, possible as retaliation for being stuck in the cold drizzle the previous evening. While some journalists extended her the grace we all deserve on our off-days, the internet proceeded to internet and lambasted her mercilessly for the off-night, and those insults can still carry to this day, a decade later.
Needless to say, the first night of the Beacon Theatre residency held gravity, but with some angst. Despite how on point she proved to be that night, there were strict orders to curtail any documenting of the performance, perhaps just in case it wasn’t a rousing success. Anyone who raised a phone’s camera, especially with a flash, was immediately descended upon by venue staff, armed with piercing flashlights to single-out and disrupt those not abiding by the rules. Still, some of us are slick. A few videos of full songs from those nights can be found on YouTube. I myself carry a camera that has a viewfinder that can be used in place of a screen. While I was too gun-shy to hold up my camera and take videos, I did press the record button a number of times and used my camera to catch some solid audio throughout the night, and managed to snap a few solid photos.
Around 8:15pm, the lights dimmed and the crowd rumbled with excitement. After a brief playback intro of the “Sugar Plum Fairy,” which she’d record and release adorned with her trademark whistles in 2019, the curtain rose to reveal Carey, centerstage surrounded by a festively decorated stage and perched on a riser wrapped like a present. The crowd erupted, and fell silent and subsequently went wild as she began to sing her 1994 blend of “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” and “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo).”
The arrangement developed for this show, which has been used as her opening number for all subsequent Christmas shows, is spaced out so she can emphasize certain lines, and allows her to deliver a definitive vocal show-out on “Bethlehem.” It’s become a guaranteed crowd-pleaser, because it allows the crowd to marvel at her voice in all its glory. As she performed it that first night, she seemed determined to hit all the notes and make it crystal clear that Mariah Carey very much still had the pipes that made so many fall in love with her more over the last nearly-two-and-a-half decades.
Over the next hour and a half, Mariah Carey owned the Beacon Theatre. She delivered a well shuffled mix of songs from her two Christmas albums, including classics like “Silent Night” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” originals like “Oh Santa,” and “When Christmas Comes,” and left the crowd overflowing with Christmas spirit by the time she returned for her encore of, you guessed it, “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Between songs and during her costume changes, a troupe of dancers, including a batch of adorable kids, danced and tied skits into the setlist, along with some typical banter from Mariah herself. Her most famous background singer of all, Trey Lorenz, also made his way to center-stage to perform “Jesus, Oh What A Wonderful Child,” a traditional Christmas song that Mariah recorded on her first Christmas album in 1994. Below is audio I captured that evening of “Silent Night,” which I’m sharing for the very first time.
Mariah’s voice showed its limits during some of the most demanding moments, but she wasn’t afraid to adapt, push, and still deliver. She seemed in it to make it known far and wide that Mariah Carey still had her vocal chops. At moments, she’d navigate a melody downward to ensure that she could complete the phrase, but at others, she wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable and go for the big notes. A peak moment was, without a doubt “Joy To The World.” Flanked by a full choir, Mariah’s rousing, gospel-driven rendition had her signature hand flailing relentlessly, and the spirit flowing through her as she hustled from end-to-end of the Beacon’s intimate stage. She even threw in a few clear, crowd-electrifying whistle notes.
And sure, there were moments that got some support from some not-so-live vocals, such as the biggest climaxes from her 2000 rendition of “O Holy Night.” But, listening back to my piecemeal recordings of that first night, and a full fan recording of a subsequent 2014 show, she kept most of it live and went for as many of the big notes as she could. It’s a conundrum wrestling with how an artist known for their vocals endures the inevitable experience of an aging voice, while managing the ageless expectations of presenting an infallible range and instrument. By 2014, Mariah seemed to walk a line: do as much as she can, and get by with a little help from a track to ensure that she could keep showing up each night. Is that really so wrong? It forces us to consider what really is and isn’t reasonable during a live performance. Where do we draw the line? A decade later, that line seems to have moved, but that’s a think piece for another day.
The most memorable and touching moment came at the show’s end. She kept the entire show Christmas-centric, until her closing number. The sole secular performance of the opening night was her 1993 classic, “Hero” (subsequent nights would also include “Emotions” and “We Belong Together”). As she charged into the song’s second verse, the microphone pack attached to the lower back of her gown saw an opportunity and ran for it, dropping to the ground mid-stage. As she tried to reorganize, she halted the song to a stop before a stagehand ran to help reassemble the lost pack, which she blamed on sweat. She elected to start “Hero” again from the beginning. In the middle of the song, tears streamed down her face, a rarity for the legend during performance. She didn’t fully break down or miss a note, but it gave a glimpse into the emotions she was carrying during this period of her life.
Reflecting on that first show and first year of Christmas performances (I went back for another performance a few nights later), that humble setting serves as a magnificent bookend to the growth she’s achieved in the Christmas domain over the last decade. In 2014, she performed 6 shows at the Beacon, all of which sold out. The next two years it grew to 8 shows. From there, the show sprouted wings and touched down in other locations, national and international. In 2019, she made a triumphant, sold-out return to Madison Square Garden; her first solo headlining performance at the venue in a decade. Now, she takes the Christmas show to arenas around the country that hold tens of thousands, a far cry from the modest, 2,600 seats inside the Beacon Theatre.
I think back to those early years at the Beacon with such fondness, warmth, and, dare I be cliché and say… joy. It was such a treat to see a legend of her magnitude in a setting that intimate, over and over again. She brought the Christmas spirit to me and so many others on those nights, and established an annual show that I consider my version of The Rockettes or The Nutcracker. It’s gotten to the point where it doesn't fully feel like Christmas if I don’t see Mariah in concert in December. And as long as it keeps bringing her joy, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
