Mariah Carey v The Spirit of Christmas

Once upon a time, there was a little girl growing up in lower Manhattan. It was the 1980s, the most dangerous decade in New York City’s history, and her neighbourhood of Battery Park was still being built on top of a landfill. But the girl’s memories of that time have a gauzy, enchanted quality. When Cirque du Soleil came to town, the show temporarily transformed the empty expanse next to her building into a fairytale village of acrobats and striped tents. In the winter, when snow blanketed the vacant space, she filled it with snow angels.

She went to university, then graduate school, and became a media executive. Her parents were both immigrants – she is half-Filipino, half-Chinese and “all American”, as she later put it – and what they most wanted for her was to have a safe, stable existence. So she lived a safe, stable life. Until one night when she went online and clicked on what appeared to be a job listing. Instead she was presented with a question: what would you do if you were not afraid to fail?

She immediately knew the answer. Her dream was to be a musician who wrote and performed original Christmas music. Most of all, she wanted to write a Christmas song: one that, like “Jingle Bells”, became such a classic, with so many covers, that far into the future people would know all the words, even if they didn’t know her name, which was Elizabeth Chan.

Christmas had always been the time when the people around Chan seemed happiest. Her family celebrations had never been extravagant, but what they did have – what everyone had – was Christmas music. It formed the soundtrack of Chan’s most joyful childhood memories. By the time she was seven, she was filling notebooks with lyrics to Christmas songs.

The job listing turned out to be a casting call for a documentary, “Failure Club”, which encouraged people to pursue their dreams. Chan was selected. Twelve years on, she supports herself as a musician engaged exclusively with Christmas music, 365 days a year.

Mariah Carey wanted to trademark the title “Queen of Christmas” not for just albums and candles but dog collars, nail polish, lingerie and beer

She has released 12 albums and written thousands of songs (she licenses work and ghostwrites for other artists, as well as under her own name). Nine of her singles have been in the top ten in the holiday charts. In 2018 the New Yorker ran a short piece about Chan entitled “Queen of Christmas”. “It’s official,” she wrote on Instagram. “I have been coronated by @newyorkermag.”

Many singers have been granted this title over the years, including Darlene Love, Brenda Lee, Dolly Parton and, of course, Mariah Carey, who is almost as closely associated with the holiday as Santa Claus: an entire genre of memes refers to it simply as “Mariah season”. Until March 2021, the queens co-existed in harmony in the kingdom of Christmas. Then Carey’s company, Lotion LLC, submitted a trademark application for the moniker “Queen of Christmas”.

Chan learned about this in 2021 in the lead-up to the release of her spoken-word album entitled – what else? – “Queen of Christmas”. The trademark lawyers she consulted told her that fighting the application would probably bankrupt her. It seemed like a battle that would take a miracle to win. Who was she compared with Carey, with her armies of fans and mountains of money?

But Chan is a person who believes in miracles. If she made a film of her life, many moments in it would be announced with a tinkling of bells and a sprinkling of snow, just as magical interventions are in Christmas movies. Chan also believed that it wasn’t just her livelihood at stake, but the orienting principle of her life: the spirit of Christmas itself.

Perhaps Carey thought that she was already so widely accepted as the queen of Christmas – articles routinely refer to her as the “undisputed” queen – that the trademark was just enshrining the obvious. Or perhaps it was a hard-nosed business decision. The array of goods cited in her application, which included not just albums and candles but dog collars, nail polish, lingerie and beer, meant a huge amount of money was at stake. But it’s hard to know what Carey’s motives were: neither she nor her lawyers agreed to be interviewed.

Chan spoke to me at length, however. The experience had been gruelling, she said, but by the time we talked the saga was nearing its conclusion – and just in time for Christmas. Only a few more days and New York’s 106.7 Lite FM radio station would transform into its seasonal alter ego, “New York’s Christmas Music Station”, switching from contemporary hits to holiday music. In a development greeted by many with joy and others with grim forbearance, the Western world was about to be inundated once again with the sleigh bells and major keys of Christmas music.

It’s a topsy-turvy pocket of the music industry in which all the typical patterns are upended, with incentives, pleasures and contradictions that reflect those of the holiday itself. The most wonderful time of the year was upon us.

Even in the earliest stories of Jesus’s birth, music, and scents, were of central importance. The Gospel of Luke describes angels singing; the Gospel of Matthew depicts the three kings offering frankincense. Fast-forward 19 centuries and, according to a study by the Journal of Business Research – the very existence of which testifies to how secular and materialistic the holiday has become – playing Christmas music in shops and filling their air with seasonal aromas leads shoppers to spend more money than they otherwise would.

“Wise retailers can act upon this lesson by blessing their customers with synchronised sound systems and scent diffusers,” the paper concludes, “and in turn receive the blessing of strong holiday sales.” (The puns are hard to resist.) In a recent survey by Statista, a data company, half of respondents said that Christmas songs were the most essential aspect of their celebrations, more important even than exchanging presents.

Holiday traditions have shifted over the years. During the Renaissance, Christmas was more of a raucous, party-down affair – Mardi Gras by way of Halloween. But singing has always been incorporated. When the Puritans briefly banned the holiday in the 17th century, they took particular issue with wassailing, a custom in which people went door-to-door singing carols, often while consuming copious amounts of alcohol (wassail was a spicy alcoholic drink). The wassailers, who tended to be poor, expected gifts from the houses they visited; if nothing was offered, they sometimes turned to vandalism. (In that light, “Now bring us some figgy pudding” starts to sound less like a request than an order.)

“We Wish You a Merry Christmas” dates to the 16th century, but many of the old carols still popular today were written during the 1800s. Some were explicitly religious, with references to hope even in the darkest times. “Silent Night” was the work of an Austrian priest in 1816 during what was known as the Year Without Summer – the eruption of an Indonesian volcano had left Europe so cold that food shortages were widespread. Yet the song holds a promise: “All is calm, all is bright”. Within a century it was so popular that, during the so-called Christmas truce of 1914 in the first world war, soldiers on opposing sides sang it to each other from the trenches.

Even most “modern” Christmas hits – those recorded in recent decades – would be considered oldies at any other time of the year

Not all 19th-century carols are nativity-focused. “Jingle Bells”, from 1857, concentrates on revelry, though maybe that’s because it was originally meant to be sung at Thanksgiving. But in one way it belonged to Christmas from the start: Southern historians claim it was written by James Pierpont, a native of Massachusetts, during a snowless winter he spent in Savannah, Georgia, meaning that it was sparked – as with so many other Christmas tunes – by nostalgia.

Michael Bublé’s 2011 cover of “Jingle Bells” has been streamed 175m times on Spotify; his cover of “Silent Night”, from the same year, has 98m hits. Frank Sinatra’s 1957 version of the latter has 156m listens. Even most “modern” Christmas hits – those recorded in recent decades – would be considered oldies at any other time of the year. In mid-December 2021 the top ten songs on Billboard’s Holiday 100 chart were, on average, written 56 years earlier. Holiday songs that are decades old also take over Billboard’s main chart, the Hot 100. They claimed six of the top ten spots a few weeks ago; the newest of the lot, Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, was released in 1994 – ancient in pop-music years.

“Those old singalong songs take us back to simpler times,” said Darren Davis, former president of iHeart Radio’s digital division. He reckons that over the decades the allure of nostalgia has increased: “The world has only gotten crazier, and the more stressed people are, the more we all seek the warm, familiar comforts of Christmas traditions.”

Very few original songs from the past 20 years make it on to radio rotation. Of those that do – like Justin Bieber’s 2011 hit “Mistletoe” and Ariana Grande’s “Santa Baby” from 2014 – almost none have lyrics that locate them in the present. It’s as though they take place in a snow globe (granted, one in which Bieber uses the term “shawty”). “We want a specific nostalgia aimed at a kind of romanticised version of the 1950s,” said Joe Bennett, a musicologist at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. “There are no lyrics about Zoom calls.” As Bennett points out, though, many older songs are themselves about nostalgia. “White Christmas”, written by Irving Berlin for the movie “Holiday Inn”, is about a yearning for the past: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” (Bing Crosby’s version, first sung in 1941, is the bestselling single of all time, worldwide.)

Christmas music is famously cyclical. Come December, we want to hear the same music as adults that was played for us as children. But though this helps explain why the Christmas canon is so difficult to break into, it also offers hope that current songs might gradually become incorporated – every one of today’s classics, after all, was once new. “If someone released a Christmas grime track – for all I know it’s been done – it’s unlikely that it would get onto your granny’s playlist,” Adam Behr, a music professor at Newcastle University, told Wired in 2019. “But you or your cousins might listen to it, and again next year, and five years later.” (There are, in fact, numerous Christmas grime tracks.)

As Chan is well aware – she has studied the historical trends of Christmas music with an intensity more common in K-pop fans or religious scholars – one of the many unique aspects of the Christmas-music industry is that songs can take decades to climb to the top spot. Wham!’s “Last Christmas” was written when George Michael’s feathered mullet was in full bloom; it didn’t reach the pinnacle in Britain for 36 years, by which point he’d been dead for four years. (In an odd coincidence, he died on Christmas Day.) Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas” took a quarter of a century to hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the longest any song has ever taken to rise to that height.

Considering how many Christmas songs have burrowed themselves into the pleasure centres of our brains, it’s a bit surprising that for decades they weren’t played much on the radio. The legend goes that, in the early 1990s, Phoenix’s KEZ was the first station to play only Christmas music from Thanksgiving through to December 25th. Vallie Richards Donovan Consulting, which helps radio stations with marketing, began aggressively pushing its clients to follow suit. “It was a tough sell,” said co-founder Dan Vallie. “People would say ‘It will never work in Miami, it’s so hot at Christmas,’ or ‘It won’t happen in San Francisco.’ But it did.”

Christmas music-athons soon became known as a dependable way to double or even triple ratings. Of iHeart’s roughly 850 stations, 88 now adopt an all-Christmas format, according to the company’s chief programming officer Tom Poleman; listeners increase, on aggregate, by 10m at this time of year. In some urban areas almost a third of all women tune in to the same Christmas station, according to Davis – and many of the new listeners stick around afterwards. Some stations now start Christmas playlists just after Halloween. In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, one Indiana station began playing Christmas music in July.

Another irregularity of Christmas radio is that, compared with the rest of the year, the playlist shrinks from about 500 songs to around 70. “We tried it every which way,” Davis told me. “But the reality is, the smaller the playlist, the bigger the ratings.” For songs that make it onto that 70-tune roster, there are huge amounts of money to be made. In 2018 Billboard estimated that recorded holiday music generated $177m a year from streaming and radio play in America alone.

It wasn’t just her livelihood at stake, but the orienting principle of her life: the spirit of Christmas itself

And Christmas-music money can be accrued in perpetuity. Noddy Holder, who co-wrote Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody”, told the Guardian in 2015: “It’s a good pension plan, put it that way.” (The song is rumoured to make the band the equivalent of $600,000 a year.) That’s presumably one reason why so many artists have produced Christmas music – though with varying commercial or artistic success. There’s AC/DC’s “Mistress for Christmas”, Bob Dylan’s “Winterlude” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Christmas Conga”. Weezer covered “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”, and David Bowie, just past his Thin White Duke era, collaborated with Bing Crosby on “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy” (the encounter was commemorated in a video so earnest and strange that it has been parodied on the web-comedy series Funny or Die). John Prine put out a Christmas album, as did Snoop Dogg; this year the Backstreet Boys released one.

It can be complicated to navigate the risks and rewards such music presents, partly because the rules governing radio royalties in America are so unusual. Covers are more likely to be successful than original compositions, but in America only the songwriter and publisher are paid when a song is played on the radio. That means a performer who gets huge airplay singing covers, or even an original song they didn’t write, earns nothing but publicity. Performers do receive royalties from streaming, but these are minimal: according to Business Insider, in 2021 Spotify paid between a third of a cent and around half a cent per listen, meaning that even a song with 10m plays earns the performer $50,000 at most. You can expect a windfall only if you’re the artist who wrote the original Christmas song.

The American system of radio royalties is so convoluted and opaque that it’s hard to work out the average royalty per listener each time a song is played, but some have gamely tried. In 2015 David Touve, now the senior director at the University of Virginia’s business school, estimated that a spin on AM/FM radio paid about $0.0000955 to the songwriter. (This would mean a single play on 106.7 Lite FM, which reaches about 100,000 listeners every 15 minutes, would reap $9.50.) George Howard, a professor at Berklee, told the radio show “Marketplace” that “All I Want For Christmas Is You” could bring in as much as $10m a year, counting radio play as well as licensing and streaming revenues.

What made Carey’s song so successful? In 1994 it was somewhat unusual for a young pop star – Carey was 25 – to release a Christmas album, but her large fan base helped prompt radio stations to play the track; the song’s growth was juiced a decade later, when it was included on the soundtrack of blockbuster Christmas rom-com “Love Actually”. The tune evokes the 1950s, the era on which so much Christmas nostalgia is focused, and its melody is so catchy that it has become both a beloved earworm and, by late December, an unavoidable irritation.

Then there are the lyrics, which pull off the neat trick of letting Carey mention practically every Christmas trope even as she rejects them for the one thing she really wants (you). “It’s kind of anti-Christmas,” Bennett said. “But not very much.” Perhaps that works because something similar is at play with Christmas itself. “It’s a warm familial gathering predicated on togetherness,” said Nathaniel Sloan of the University of Southern California. “And it is also the apex of consumer capitalism.”

The cliché around Christmas music is that it’s a cynical cash grab. “The more romantic version is that artists want to connect with people emotionally,” Bennett said, and singing about the holidays is a prime opportunity to do so. “Most pop lyrical themes relate to romantic love,” he said. “Are you being cynical if you write about romantic love? I don’t think so. It’s the same with Christmas music. The tropes are just more obvious because there are fewer of them.”

Christmas singers often themselves suggest that the holiday holds a special place in their hearts. In a short documentary released in 2019 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “All I Want For Christmas Is You”, Carey attributes some of the song’s success to her abiding love of the season. “The emotional connection has to be pure,” she says. (Carey grew up poor enough that her mother sometimes wrapped up fruit as presents; these days she is known for festivities involving Santa arriving on a sleigh pulled by real reindeer. “Listen, she loves Christmas,” producer Randy Jackson says in the same documentary, adding that he calls her Mariah Claus.)

Elizabeth Chan, for her part, is so passionate about Christmas that she keeps a Christmas tree up in the living room all year round; during the holidays she has two. She refers to being on a “Christmas journey”, calls the holiday her “muse” and describes the music as “an art form that allows you to celebrate the things money can’t buy – family, love, home, togetherness”.

Elizabeth Chan is so passionate about Christmas that she keeps a Christmas tree up in the living room all year round

The genre has enabled Chan to establish what she describes as a “small, family-run business” (her husband, a graphic designer, designs her album covers and website), one that is more lucrative than anything else she’s ever done. She declined to be specific about her earnings, but said she gets frustrated by the focus on money. Even early on in her career, when she says she and her husband sometimes subsisted on dollar-pizza slices, she eschewed the more financially stable path of singing covers. Instead she writes songs inspired by her own life, albeit loosely. A song called “Best Gift Ever” is about Chan’s husband; she released an album in 2017, not long after the birth of her first daughter, Noelle, filled with songs that allude to motherhood. Noelle, now five, has already started writing songs of her own, one of which has been played on the radio.

When Chan found out the cost of hiring a lawyer to contest Carey’s application, she decided to file a motion herself. She also asked a former university classmate who’d become a law professor if his students could help. Instead, he told her that the law firm where he works could take on the case free and introduced her to a colleague who specialises in intellectual property, Louis Tompros.

Carey’s company had attempted to register four trademarks: “Queen of Christmas”, “Princess of Christmas”, “QoC” and “PoC”. (“Princess of Christmas” is Chan’s nickname for Noelle, and she had already been using the tag for her daughter’s recording career.) Contesting the applications was expensive in part because they covered 16 separate classes of products; Tompros called this “textbook trademark bullying”. Though Carey’s company hadn’t yet used any of the trademarks – the applications were for “future use” – if successful, they would have meant that no one else could ever do so. Tompros challenged the effort on the ground that Chan was already employing the terms.

His opposition motion, which began “Christmas is big enough for more than one queen”, garnered a rash of press. Even Darlene Love, of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” fame, weighed in: “David Letterman officially declared me the Queen of Christmas 29 years ago, a year before [Carey] released ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, and at 81 years of age I’m NOT changing anything.”

Soon after, Carey seemed to distance herself from the case. When a writer interviewing her for Vanity Fair called her the “undeniable queen of Christmas”, she responded, “I did not say that. Some other lady that I had never heard of said something like that.” (Carey signed declarations for all of the trademark applications, “meaning she would have been fully aware of [them]”, Tompros wrote to me in an email.)

Carey’s company did not meet the deadline to defend the filings, so the US Trademark and Patent Office denied them on November 15th. Chan had found out that this decision was imminent a day before we spoke. When she began recounting this part of her “Christmas journey”, she started crying. Some media coverage had presented what happened as a skirmish over a crown, but Chan didn’t see it that way. To her, it had been a clash between one woman who wanted the crown for herself, and another who wanted to protect everyone’s right to wear it. “My legal team had the Christmas spirit,” she said. The combat with Carey had inspired her to write a song on her new album about her lawyers: “The Giver”. ■

Molly Langmuir is a writer who lives in Brooklyn

ILLUSTRATIONS: JULIA GEISER