Mariah Carey’s Story of When She Wrote ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ Was Disputed by Her Co-writer

Walter Afanaseiff, co-writer and co-producer for Mariah Carey’s ‘All I want for Christmas is You’, challenged the singer’s story about how and when she wrote the song. In an interview in 2017, Carey claimed that this evergreen festive song was a “song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard”. However, when Afanaseiff appeared on the ‘Hot Takes and Deep Dives With Jess Rothschild’ podcast, he disputed her version of how events unfolded. 

“When she started to hint at the fact that, ‘Oh, I wrote that song when I was a little girl!’ But why weren’t you saying that for 12 or 13 or 15 years prior to that?,” he stated. He also added, “so it just sort of developed in her mind. She doesn’t play anything. She doesn’t play keyboard or piano. She doesn’t understand music, she doesn’t know chord changes and music theory or anything like that. She doesn’t know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a major seventh chord.”

He continued, “so to claim that she wrote a very complicated chord-structured song with her finger on a Casio keyboard when she was a little girl, it’s kind of a tall tale.” In his version, they were “holed up in this beautiful home that they were renting, and it was the summertime and there was a piano” when they made the all time Christmas favourite ‘All I want for Christmas is You’.

“I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock. Mariah chimed in and started singing ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas’,” he added. “So on and on, and it was like a game of ping-pong. I’d hit the ball to her, she hit it back to me.” Carey was seen with her 11 year old daughter earlier this month at a concert in Toronto, where they collectively sang ‘Away in a Manger’.

“This is my baby girl, here,” Carey said when introducing Monroe to her fans. “Eleven years ago, I got the greatest gift. You know what, I don’t have birthdays, but the birthing day was the greatest gift ever, when I had my twins Roc and Roe.”

– Riya Sohini