By Christi Carras
Tribune News Service
By royal decree, the queen of Christmas has put an official end to Halloween and heralded the holiday season.
That’s right — at exactly midnight Eastern time Sunday, Mariah Carey posted her annual end-of-Halloween video set to the jingly tune of her yuletide classic, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
In the brief clip, Carey wears a festive, sparkly red gown and approaches three jack-o-lanterns carved with the words “it’s,” “not” and “time.” At the stroke of midnight, the singer wrecks the middle “not” pumpkin with a candy cane-striped baseball bat and trades her spooky Halloween decor for wreaths, stockings and Christmas trees.
This can mean only one thing: It’s time for “All I Want for Christmas Is You” to sleigh the music charts and provide a nostalgic soundtrack for the most wonderful time of the year. “[S]mash that pumpkin and treat it as pie,” a title card reads. “Cause we still gotta get through Thanksgiving!!!”
Also featured in the video is a mysterious gift covered in shiny silver wrapping paper and stamped with the date Nov. 5 — hinting that Carey might surprise fans with a seasonal treat at the end of the week.
Before making her formal announcement, the Grammy winner already teased her Christmastime rise last week by cleverly responding to a viral photo of a jukebox in Dallas that has a sign warning patrons that “Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ will be skipped if played before Dec. 1” and will only be “allowed one time a night” after the start of the month.
“Is this the war on Christmas I’ve heard about?” one person wrote in a tweet that has amassed more than 51,000 likes — to which Carey replied with an image of herself donning armor on a battlefield, ready to fight for her favorite holiday.