‘I decorate my house like Christmas even in summer’

Mariah Carey’s thirteenth album, Merry Christmas II You was released in November, much before the festive season and it is all about the Yuletide spirit. Read on.

Mariah Carey’s thirteenth album, Merry Christmas II You was released in November, much before the festive season. The album sold a lot of copies and debuted at number four on the Billboard Hot 200 charts. This is Carey’s second Christmas album. The first one was released 16 years ago in 1994 titled Merry Christmas I.

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Says Carey, "It has been a long time since my first Christmas album. I really loved making the current album. I felt it was the appropriate time for me to be creating this type of music." Carey started work on the album months before it hit the shelves at a studio she set up at home, to take in the yuletide spirit.

"I was fortunate enough to be able to work mostly from home and I decorated the house like Christmas, even though it was summer. Sometimes I would swim in the pool and then write. I potted a fully decorated Christmas tree and would look at it while singing. It resulted in a lot of really traditional songs on the album," she adds.

In Merry Christmas II You, Carey has mixed classics like Little drummer boy with O little town of Bethlehem, making the carols up-tempo. For Carey, singing carols is something that she truly revels in. “Doing a Christmas album is a whole different state of mind than doing a regular album. It’s something that I’m so close to, and it’s always going to be genuine and festive whether it’s Here comes Santa Claus or a serious song about the real meaning of Christmas,” states Carey.

So what does the 40-year-old, now pregnant with twins, do during the Christmas season? “Christmas is all about going for mass. It is celebration time, time to sing, be happy, decorating your place, putting up a Christmas tree and exchanging gifts. It has always been my favorite holiday,” she says