While she sings “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey is close to getting a different gift this holiday.
Her festive single has again reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, a peak it previously hit in January of this year. If the momentum continues to build as we get closer to Christmas, Carey just might get her 19th career No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Carey’s current competition for the top spot happens to be The Weeknd, who earned his fourth No. 1 hit this week with “Heartless.”
If Carey were to hit No. 1, she’d go from being the female artist with the most No. 1 singles ever, to the soloist with the most No. 1 singles ever (breaking her current tie with Elvis Presley, and putting her one No. 1 single away from tying with The Beatles for artists with the most No. 1 singles ever).
Although “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is now synonymous with the start of the holiday season, being the highest-charting Holiday hit by a soloist in Hot 100 history, it was not nearly as successful upon release.
Debuting in Oct. 1994, the song peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, but was ineligible for the Hot 100 chart because it was not released as a commercial single. After that rule went away in 1998, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” finally entered the Hot 100 chart, peaking at No. 83 in 2000.
As the song —which was famously covered in 2003’s Love, Actually — grew into a holiday staple, it topped Billboard’s Hot Digital Songs chart in 2005, but would face a new rule marking it ineligible for the Hot 100: no recurrent singles.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You” regularly topped the Billboard Hot 100 Recurrents chart every December from 2005 to 2008, but did not have a shot at the Hot 100 again until Billboard revised its ban on recurrent singles to allow any song charting in the Top 50 onto the Hot 100 chart. Since then, the tune has climbed the Hot 100 chart each year until it finally peaked at No. 3 in January of this year, and again this month. It also happens to be the song’s 25th anniversary.
A No. 1 would make Carey one of the rare artists to top the Hot 100 in three consecutive decades, which would be quite a way for her to end the 2010s.
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