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Mariah Carey has been crowned to be the Queen of Christmas, which is her favorite holiday. In a new interview, she explained how her traumatic childhood led to Christmas being her favorite day of the year.
“When you grow up with a messed-up life and then you’re able to have this transformation where you can make your life what you want it to be? That is joy for me,” she told W Magazine. “That’s why I want my kids to have everything they can have. I want them to be able to understand that they can be anything they want to be.”
She added, “People think I had this princess-style life or whatever, a kind of fairy-tale existence where I just emerged, like, ‘Here I am!’ And that is not what it is.”
As soon as the holiday season starts, her hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” becomes the song of the season. It has landed on the Billboard chart every season since 1994.
Mariah Carey Opened Up About Her Traumatic Childhood In The Meaning of Mariah Carey
In 2020, Mariah Carey released a memoir titled The Meaning of Mariah Carey. In the book, she dug deep and spoke about her dysfunctional family. During an interview on The Oprah Conversation with Oprah Winfrey, she said her brother was “extremely violent,” described her sister as “troubled and traumatized,” said she felt neglected by her mother and like she didn’t know her father.
She wrote about being tortured by her sister, Allison.
“When I was 12 years old, my sister drugged me with valium, offered me a pinky nail full of cocaine, inflicted me with third degree burns and tried to sell me out to a pimp,” she said.
Carey said she and her father didn’t have the strongest bond but had many heart-to-heart discussions during his last days.
“That was sort of maybe where we didn’t connect early on. I didn’t understand the strictness,” she said. “It was an almost military approach to life. We talked about his experience in the military, which is intense, what he revealed to me. We had a lot of discussions when he was on his deathbed and that was a time when I felt I just wanted to let him know that anything we ever went through, and our disconnect, like, it was never his fault and that was an important part for me.”
