All Mariah Carey wants for Christmas is Yule.
The 49-year-old chanteuse is so devoted to the holiday, she says she has even more Christmas spirit than her own 8-year-old twins, Moroccan and Monroe, with ex-husband Nick Cannon, 39.
Carey shared 10 of her “Christmas essentials,” rattling off a list of her favorite things to do — like blasting holiday tunes 24/7, traveling to Aspen, Colorado, and cooking for three days straight — in a new six-minute video for GQ.
Looking radiant in a plunging red dress and rocking some serious jewels, Carey offers that she loves old-time Christmas specials — like the animated “Frosty the Snowman” and the 1964 claymation classic “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” — more than certain other people close to her.
“I watch them all. I’m literally like a little kid at Christmas, probably more than, like, the kids I’m around,” she says in the video. “Like, worse than my own kids.”
The songstress, who recently nabbed a third Guinness World Record for her seasonal hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” also shares that she has spent holidays in snowy Aspen for a “really, really long time,” and she even encounters reindeer while there. Oh, and she’s BFFs with a guy named Santa Claus.
“I always see Santa Claus. Santa Claus is there. We talk things over,” says the sultry singer. “You might think I’m making this up, but this is true. You know, I’m kinda like the hotline for Santa Claus, so if anybody wants to talk to Santa, just, like, DM me and we’ll make it work.”
And she’s so jolly for the holly that she says she cooks for three days straight — Dec. 23, 24 and 25, including an unnamed recipe she inherited from her father that she cooks every Christmas Eve.
“People don’t believe that I cook, by the way. They think I’m lying,” says Carey. “It’s relaxing for me, because I’m not thinking about business. I’m not thinking about anything else.” (Though she does admit she has a sous chef to help her.)
And the secret ingredient in any holiday recipe?
“Love, darling — love,” she practically coos. “You gotta cook with love. If you don’t cook with love, it’s not gonna taste good.”
Carey, who will bring her annual “All I Want for Christmas” tour to Madison Square Garden on Dec. 15, also shares that she gets “really upset” if Christmas music isn’t playing when she wakes up. “I freak out,” she says. One of her favorite holiday tunes: James Brown’s obscure 1968 song “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto.”
Unsurprisingly, the diamond-wearing diva also has a penchant for bodacious baubles.
“For most of the year, diamonds rule. But at Christmas, I do a ruby thing,” she says as she shows off a huge red rock on her left ring finger.
But the festive flashiness is real, as the cheery crooner says she tosses aside negativity and embraces a tangible, “heightened” feeling of nostalgia as she spends holiday time with her family.
“I’m just thankful that I’ve been blessed with that feeling because I don’t get that most of the year,” she says. “This is why Christmas is so important to me, and anybody involved in my life will always understand that this has to happen — and this is a moment that if I don’t have that, the rest of the year doesn’t even matter.”
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