'I grew up with a messed-up life': Mariah Carey says tough childhood made her fall in love with Christmas
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA: With the Christmas season creeping upon us, Mariah Carey’s 'All I Want for Christmas Is You', has re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart with the hopes of landing at No 1 once again. Carey's modern carol is the first and only Christmas single to be certified diamond. Moreover, since its release in 1994, the Christmas season has been synonymous with listening to the 52-year-old icon.
In a recent interview, Carey went down memory lane and revealed that her obsession with Christmas actually stems from her tough childhood. "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," Carey told W magazine on Friday, November 25. "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."
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Carey admitted that she did not always feel happy as a child, which is why she has dubbed herself "very festive" or the "Queen of Christmas" since the festival truly makes her merry. "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," the singer explained.
The 'Fantasy' singer has detailed her violent upbringing in her 2020 memoir. In the book, Carey claims that her older brother Morgan Carey was abusive to her and her mother to such a degree that she had to call the cops. "Choking in tears, I did my best to calmly tell her, ‘My brother really hurt my mother, and I’m home alone. Please come help,'" she wrote. "One of the cops, looking down at me but speaking to another cop beside him, said, 'If this kid makes it, it’ll be a miracle.' And that night, I became less of a kid and more of a miracle."
Carey also suffered abuse from her older sister Alison Carey who allegedly drugged her with valium when she was 12 while also leaving her with one of her sister's boyfriends, who was packing a pistol during a car ride, as reported by PageSix.
The 'Obsessed' singer talked further about feeling "othered" for being biracial while growing up in the predominately white Long Island neighborhood of Huntington, as per her W interview. "There were no role models for people who were clearly mixed or, you know, light-skinned or whatever we were categorizing it as then, so I didn’t know who to look up to when I was growing up," Carey stated. "It was difficult."