MARIAH Carey is beloved for her hit holiday anthems, but fans may not know she’s forbidden from being called the Queen of Christmas.
Last year, the R&B singer waged a legal war against Christmas songwriter Elizabeth Chan over her coveted title.
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With over 1.6 billion streams on Spotify, it’s hard to get through a holiday season without hearing Carey’s song All I Want for Christmas Is You.
It’s just one of many hits on her 1994 album Merry Christmas which turned out to be an unexpecting career highlight for the five-octave range songbird.
Now as each Christmas approaches, Carey works to boost sales of the record with social media posts, refreshed merchandise, and other marketing ploys.
With nearly two decades of rocking the Christmas charts under her belt, Carey decided to own the title of Queen of Christmas legally and use it for future marketing.
She and her team had big plans to slap the nickname on everything from perfume to sunglasses, but the title didn’t come easy.
In March 2021, Carey applied to trademark the phrase but was met with intense criticism from singers Chan, 43, and Darlene Love, 82.
Chan is a New York-based artist who has made a career out of exclusively writing, recording, and producing Christmas music.
Love is known for her hit song Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) which she performed annually on the Late Show with David Letterman, who dubbed her the Christmas Queen.
Outraged by the filing, Chan lawyered up and successfully blocked Carey from obtaining rights to the title in a landmark victory.
Even other potential nicknames like Princess Christmas and QOC were blocked by the United States Trademark Trial and Appeal Board in November 2022.
After the decision, a successful Chan said: “Christmas is a season of giving, not the season of taking, and it is wrong for an individual to attempt to own and monopolize a nickname like Queen of Christmas for the purposes of abject materialism.”
She continued: “As an independent artist and small business owner, my life’s work is to bring people together for the holiday season, which is how I came to be called the Queen of Christmas.
“I wear that title as a badge of honor and with full knowledge that it will be – and should be – bestowed on others in the future.”
Chan ended her statement by saying the decision has protected “future Queens of Christmas.”
Love also read about the filing and posted on social media that any issues with Letterman’s title could be taken up with her lawyer.
This year, Carey welcomed the holiday season with an annual November 1 social media post and addressed the ruling in an interview.
“I’ve been looking forward to this Christmas for, like the whole year,” she told People on December 4.
“Because last year wasn’t the greatest… it wasn’t my most fun version of Christmas ever.”
When asked about how she deals with the hate, Carey said she’s been writing, praying, and doing anything that can put her in a better place.
“It’s like these little things that can take you from possibly being in a really bad mood to just being in a better place immediately,” she said, after addressing her fan-given title Queen of Being Unbothered.
“I don’t read anything written about me.”
Credit Gist New Today News in Newspaper Nigeria Headlines
