Grappling with Nostalgia at Mariah Carey's Christmas Concert

There are things I come across during this time of year that can take me right back to the Christmases of my youth—a time when everything felt so special and light and perfect. When I smell the sweet caramelized goop that seeps out of baking sweet potatoes, I can see a younger version of my mother, with her nails long and Rudolph red, preparing the holiday feast from scratch. When I have my first glass of eggnog of the season, I can picture my dad in his pajamas and his drippy-ass do-rag, struggling to put together some new gadget toy for me on Christmas Day. But the biggest catalyst for a trip down Christmas memory lane for me has always been the sound of Mariah Carey's voice.

The twinkling melody that kicks off "All I Want for Christmas" is like a flux capacitor, yanking me from the closet I call an apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, back to my family's suburban home in Northeast Ohio in the mid 90s. By the time Mariah is pining for her wayward lover to come back, I can see all of my family, soulfully swaying under the flickering halos of red and green flashing lights. Of course there are other great Christmas tunes—Luther Vandross's "Mistletoe Jam," Run-DMC's "Christmas in Hollis," and Aaron Neville's "Please Come Home for Christmas"—but it's Mariah's holiday trills paired with that Phil Spector-indebted Wall of Sound that makes me feel, if only for a moment, like I'm still sitting across from my grandfather, who now suffers from extreme dementia, judiciously negotiating on how we're going to split an entire apple pie just between the two of us.

I'm clearly not the only one who has a reverence for the song. Although it was written quickly during a 15-minute jam session between Carey and songwriter Walter Afanaseiff, and the backing music is all computer-programmed, the tune has made an undeniable impact on pop culture. It's been more than 20 years since its 1994 release, and the track still tops Billboard's Holiday 100 chart every year. It's the best-selling download of Carey's entire catalogue, racking up 2.8 million digital sales since Nielsen began tracking them in the 2000s and it has over 145 million views on YouTube and 80 million streams on Spotify.

Merry Christmas, the album that "All I Want" hails from, is such a fixture in my family that we've had it on almost every format: on cassette to play in the car, on compact disc to rock in the ole 60-CD changer, on MP3 for those brick iPods. And now, we bump it via the cloud, streaming it through the Spotify app on the smart TV. And considering Carey has just hopped on the hipster trend and released a special edition red-vinyl version, Merry Christmas will probably be making its first appearance on me and my girlfriend's turntable this Christmas.

Of course a big part of the appeal of "All I Want" and the Merry Christmas album is Carey's uncanny voice, which lulls you with a low register and then climbs to some of highest octaves humanly possible. Recorded back in 1994, when her pitch was at its pinnacle, you'd be forgiven for mistaking her runs for a dolphin whistle, especially on the climax of her gospel-indebted rendition of "O Holy Night," where she approaches glass-shattering range. Not to mention the songs go beyond kiddie Christmas themes and religion to evoke more adult concerns of longing and love. And beyond the music, it's just fucking Mariah Carey—a force that is larger than life, pop music's elusive chanteuse. With all those elements at play, it's easy to see why it's hailed as a holiday classic.

But despite how great Merry Christmas and "All I Want" may be, there's more to it all than dope tunes. If it was just about Carey's artistry, than her second Christmas album (yes, she has two Christmas albums) and other Christmas albums by renowned artists would be getting record numbers of streams on Spotify, too. No, Merry Christmas represents more in our collective consciousness. It just soared to the top of the holiday charts this season for the first time in 17 years thanks in large part to the generation of millennials out there for whom this music is the soundtrack to their holiday memories.

My girlfriend, for instance, has often told me that this album is the record she played on repeat at her mother's new home the first Christmas after her parents got divorced. It's a bittersweet reflection, but there's something comforting to her about it all and I can see it in her eyes when she sings along to "All I Want," trying to hit Carey's crazy notes. And honestly, I find it comforting too, because it reminds me of everything that was and gives me a bit of distance from everything that is.

I witnessed this phenomenon of widespread nostalgia around Carey's Christmas music firsthand this past weekend, when the two of us went to Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You performance at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan. It was Carey's second annual residency there during the holidays performing yuletide music. At the sold-out show, I expected to see mostly children and aging Boomer tourists. Instead, the crowd was peppered with lots of people our age dressed in cool, dark downtown palettes, replete with all the signifiers of "creative" jobs. They too looked as if they'd lurched their way uptown from their Brooklyn hovels to get a Mariah-guided trip back through their youth.

Of course, as much I love the music, I know that too much nostalgia can be a problem. Intellectually, I'm well aware that the past always looks better in reflection than it actually was IRL, especially if you were a child who didn't have the faculties to see the world for the insane and violent and depressing place it always has been and probably always will be. Living in the glorious glow of yesterday feels nice for a moment, but it can keep you from addressing the things that need to be reckoned with today, such as the staggering number of displaced, innocent people fleeing their war-torn countries looking for somewhere safe to live; blacks in this country living in terror of the very people charged with protecting them; or the mass murders that happen at the rate of more than one per day. As we took our seats, I wondered where'd we be if all the young people there—me and my girl included—who chase their salad days through the warm embrace of entertainment and commerce, applied that same passion to fixing some of our world's major problems.

On a personal level, as much as I loved Merry Christmas, I wasn't even sure I could get into the spirit of it all. Christmas has long lost that ethereal glow it had when I was young. I'm grown enough to know now that virgins don't give birth to babies with superpowers and the only thing that fat white guys in uniforms give blacks boys is 25-to-life. And the memories that I have of my childhood Christmas time are further away than they've ever been, if only because so many of the people I made them with are no longer here. Some of my loved ones have died, others might as well be dead considering they have no idea who I am or what is even going on anymore, and others don't come around anymore for petty differences and misunderstandings. Life keeps creeping on, and I suppose many smart people would argue that you've got to creep on with it and come to terms with what you have to leave behind. I'm not a follower of Jesus, but his whole bit about giving up childish things when you become an adult makes a lot of sense. Hanging on to your youth for too long can be a dangerous proposition.

And so it was with these mixed feelings of despondency and guilt-ridden nostalgia that me and my girl waited for Carey to take the stage. On one hand, I really wanted to give myself over to Mariah's magical Christmas dream; on the other hand, I kind of hated myself for being so damn sentimental. Not to mention I was worried that I had so much emotional investment in this music that there was actually no way Carey's performance could ever live up to what I'd created in my mind—I mean, her disastrous December 2014 performance of "All I Want" at Rockefeller Center, has been hailed by critics as a prime examples that nothing, not even her superlative voice, lasts forever.

When the swelling plush red curtain in the Beacon Theatre was finally lifted to reveal an elegant and voluptuous Carey in a stunning white dress with a gargantuan Christmas tree towering behind her, the crowd quickly came to their feet, whooping and clapping. They didn't sit back down for the next hour and 15 minutes. And I couldn't help but join them. Just hearing her voice and the sweet holiday melodies behind her was too infectious to resist. But what was really cool was that I wasn't exactly taken back into the past this time, thinking of my deceased loved ones or the all the lost time. Instead, I was firmly planted in the now, sharing a new Christmas moment with my girl. We danced and sang every word to each other like it was fucking karaoke. I didn't even know I knew the words to "Gloria (in Excelcis Deo)."

As great as it was, I can't say my mind didn't wander to dark places. About midway through the show, I started to wonder what it would mean if a terrorist maniac—whether it be of the ISIS or Dylann Roof variety—came barging into the theater just as Carey hit the climax of "Joy to the World" and put into motion the kind of tragedy we've seen play out so often over the past few years. I wondered how, in such a world of immense suffering, did I deserve to be there having a good time. But then again, perhaps it's the possibility that something really fucked up could happen to any of us—or even the probability that something at least kind of fucked up will happen to us at some point that demands that we actually cherish our rare moments of happiness with a manic of abandon.

It's important for me to say to you that the Carey we saw that night was not the Carey who hit those insane high notes on the recorded version of "O Holy Night" or frolicked around in the snow in a red snowsuit in the "All I Want" music video more than 20 years ago. Her range was by no-means limited, but it was tastefully restrained. She wasn't R&B's Marilyn Monroe anymore—rather, she was an elegant Christmas Queen Diva.

After three outfit changes and a few jokes about dreidels and Ol' Dirty Bastard, I looked around and realized that not only was she different, but out in the audience, we were different, too. And that was what I think made the concert a kind of unlikely transformative experience for me. It wasn't a rehash of past memories for me, but the beginning of an entirely new one. One that I shared with my girlfriend and I won't soon forget. It's crazy when you realize that you can still get that special feeling of connection and elation that you had when you were a child as an adult, albeit from a different place. I know I'll never get the Christmases of my youth back, but that doesn't mean that I can't create something even better with the people who are still in my life.

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Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas tour continues tonight and Friday, December 17 and 18, at the Beacon Theatre in New York.