To begin with: I intend zero disrespect to Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
It is flawless, timeless, ageless, in a world where very few songs about anything are even one of those, let along songs about or set during the inescapably cheesy Christmas season.
Me, skipping every version of ‘Wonderful Christmastime’.
Just last night I watched a bar full of grown men absolutely go off to every word. If it somehow wasn’t an undisputed classic in everyone’s mind before Love Actually, it certainly is now.
But ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ is nearly a quarter of a century old. It was released in 1994, only ten years after Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’. It is closer to Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ (1973), chronologically, than it is to right now.
It is only six years younger than Die Hard and Scrooged, a mere twelve months behind The Nightmare Before Christmas, almost a full decade ahead of Love Actually and Elf.
It’s really hard to write a good, modern Christmas song. One that you sometimes want to put on in March just because it’s such a banger. One that doesn’t make anybody groan when it comes up on the playlist, that feels fun and festive and actually about something other than “CHRISTMAS IS SO AMAZING OMG” or “Christmas makes me kind of horny”.
And while there are have been some decent, quietly dreamy Christmas songs written in recent years by everyone from Coldplay and The Killers to She & Him and Sufjan Stevens, we are really lacking in new classics. Actual bangers.
Except we’re not. Because the undisputed queen of 2018 Ariana Grande gave us one five years ago.
If you don’t know about ‘Santa Tell Me’, now you know.
From her 2013 holiday album Christmas Kisses – before ‘Problem’, ‘Break Free’, or ‘Side To Side’, let alone ‘thank u, next‘ – ‘Santa Tell Me’ is like the shy little R&B sister to the all-out pop of Mariah’s classic.
It’s got everything you’d expect – sleigh bells, toy-like glockenspiels, sleek but dreamy strings, a direct address to Saint Nick regarding Ari’s love life which you really shouldn’t overthink from a logical perspective.
After the bridge it bursts into these lush layers of choir vocals, harmonies and a sublime handclap breakdown while she belts over the top, every dollar you’d expect to be poured a major pop release audible in the production. It’s a slower BPM, but it’s still fun as hell.
But it’s also surprisingly vulnerable, in some of the same ways ‘All I Want…’ has a raw, putting-it-all-on-the-line edge to it.
“Santa, tell me if he really cares / ‘Cause I can’t give it all away if he won’t be here / Next year,” she pleads in the chorus.
“I’ve been down this road before / Fell in love on Christmas night / But on New Year’s Day I woke up and he wasn’t by my side.”
After a year where so many people fell unexpectedly in love with Grande, got invested in her ups and downs and the newfound emotional honesty of her 2018 sound, there’s no better time to embrace ‘Santa Tell Me’.
It’s the most perfect, sugar-sweet, emotionally real Christmas banger – of this century.