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Today, as she does every year, Mariah Carey “defrosted” her big Christmas hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
All she has to do is sing two words in her signature falsetto and jingle bells start ringing:
“It’s time!!!”
But did you know the New Jersey connection?
As the song hits its 30th anniversary for Christmas 2024 and we prepare to here it another 58 billion times this festive season, here’s a look at the song’s local ties.
A year before the release of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Carey filmed the music video for the song in Jersey.
The superstar singer, yet to be anointed the Queen of Christmas, headed to Fairy Tale Forest, a children’s attraction in Oak Ridge. The family destination had just the Christmassy atmosphere she needed for the video, which she also directed.
Carey filmed the video, which has been watched 787 million times on YouTube, at Fairy Tale Forest’s Christmas Village.
You can see the sequence, featuring the village snowman, at the 2:37 mark in the music video (watch below).
Actors in elf costumes descended on the Jersey Christmas mainstay as snow blowing machines were set up for the video. The filming for that part of the video took a day.
Larry Woehle was there.
“What I do remember is how tall Mariah was,” he tells NJ Advance Media of Carey, who reportedly stands 5-foot-8 or thereabouts.
“Wow, you’re really tall,” he told her, and, per his recollection, she laughed.
Carey showed up with a big bus and “huge entourage,” says Woehle, 62, who was working in maintenance at Fairy Tale Forest at the time.
“She was nice to everybody,” he says.
While he wasn’t all that acquainted with Carey or her music at the time, he asked her to sign an autograph for his newborn daughter.
Woehle recalls the park’s snowman and Carey frolicking in the frost.
“She was dancing around and throwing snow up in the air,” he says.
“It was cold, it was a lot of snow on the ground,” he says — he remembers thinking he couldn’t wait for everything to be wrapped.
Woehle, who lives in Blauvelt, Rockland County, also remembers the music video entourage enjoying a turkey dinner at Fairy Tale Forest.
“Mariah wanted salmon so I had to go out and find some salmon,” he says.
Tommy Mottola, former CEO of Sony Music, who was then married to Carey — they wed earlier that year and separated in 1997 — dressed as Santa Claus for the video.
Paul Woehle Sr., a German immigrant, built Fairy Tale Forest in the 1950s, inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales. The attraction, which was closed since 2003, was refurbished and reopened in August.
“All I Want for Christmas Is You,” written by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, was the lead single from Carey’s 1994 holiday album “Merry Christmas” and has had such staying power that it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Carey defrosted the song once again at midnight Nov. 1 to herald the holiday season, releasing a video (see below) in which she wears a Morticia Addams look to mark the transition from Halloween time to the countdown to yuletide.
The song has a very good chance of crowning the chart for a sixth consecutive year.
You can catch Carey sing the Christmas favorite live.
Mariah Carey’s Christmas Time tour is coming to the Prudential Center in Newark Dec. 13.
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at [email protected] and followed at @AmyKup.
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