All she wants for Christmas is for certain people to stop being ‘ridiculous’.
Mariah Carey is dumping leftover eggnog all over her former collaborator’s claims that she tells an “alternate story” of how “All I Want for Christmas” came to be.
Carey’s former co-producer and co-writer Walter Afanasieff recently told the “Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild” podcast that stories of the singer writing the Christmas song on her Casio keyboard as a child were nothing more than fairy tales. .
Now Carey, 52, is hoping to set the record straight.
“Mariah never claimed to have written ‘All I Want for Christmas’ by herself or as a child. She has always given Walter credit, as he is cited as the song’s composer, so that would be ridiculous,” Carey’s rep told The Post.
“I’m not sure where that rumor came from, but Mariah is very respectful of writers and the craft, as she is a songwriter herself.”
The singer threw shade at her former music partner by posting a vintage VH1 clip to her Instagram Story that shows a clip of her from 1994 explaining the behind-the-scenes of writing “All I Want for Christmas.”
“I was on the farm, upstate where we shot the video, and it was night, and I was walking around, and I had the idea for the song,” she said at the time.
“I don’t know where it came from, sometimes things come to me like that,” she continued. “That melody just popped into my head, the verse melody. And so, I was walking around, I walked in and there was a little keyboard set up there and I kind of finished the lyrics and the melody came pretty quickly.”
Afanasieff, 64, said the two were originally on the same page about the song – but about 10 years ago, there was suddenly an “alternate story” being told.
“She started to hint at the fact that, ‘Oh, I wrote this song when I was a little girl.’ But why didn’t you say that for 12, 13 or 15 years before that? So it kind of developed in his mind,” he said.
Carey, in fact, told Billboard in 2017 that she came up with the song when she was just a kid.
“I’m proud of this song that I basically wrote as a kid on my little Casio keyboard,” she said at the time.
Afanasieff slammed the chart-topping diva, claiming the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter is actually musically challenged.
“She doesn’t play anything, she doesn’t play keyboards 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,” said Afanasieff.
“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 is kind of a far-fetched story,” he added on the podcast.
Afanasieff said he and Carey created the song together while working on three songs for her Christmas album, “Merry Christmas.”
“We were hiding in this beautiful house that [Mariah was] renting, and it was summer and there was piano. So the writing of ‘All I Want for Christmas’ is, I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of rock,” he said as he played the bass line.
The producer said he was playing the piano when Carey started singing, “I don’t want much for Christmas.”
“And so on, and it was like a ping-pong game. I hit the ball to her, she throws it back to me,” he said.
Afanasieff said the singer was responsible for the melodies and lyrics while he was in charge of the music and chords.
Both Afanasieff and Carey are equally credited for the hit Christmas song, with no other writers or producers.
They worked together on several of their studio albums, including “Emotions” and “Music Box”.
Afanasieff’s comments weren’t the only controversial moment for the modern Christmas classic in 2022. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Orleans in June on behalf of the creators of the 1989 song of the same title “All I Want for Christmas Is You”, recorded by Vince Vance and the Valiants. That song was covered in 2020 by Kelly Clarkson, who told Billboard that she had been singing the song “since she was a kid.”
The lawsuit was filed on November 1.
Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was released in 1994 and continues to top the charts each holiday season.
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