“Fans are outraged,” proclaims CNN — all because Dallas dive bar Stoneleigh P doesn’t want anyone playing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” until Dec. 1.
Once the Christmas month hits, managers and owners at the P will allow the 1994 holiday classic just once a night. They prove it with a sign inside the bar — one that’s been in use for about three years and has been, among regulars, a very long inside joke, says general manager Laura Garrison, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
“I don’t hate Mariah Carey and I don’t hate Christmas,” she told CNN. She just doesn’t want Christmas starting before Thanksgiving.
You can sorta see why: It’s only Nov. 2, and Carey’s most famous Christmas song is already ranked as the No. 48 song in the United States. It’s streamed hundreds of millions of times each year, and it’s earned Carey more than $60 million in royalties, Quartz reports. Time magazine calls it “the gift that keeps on giving.”
Just 5 minutes before Garrison talked to The News, a customer tried to play the Christmas tune today.
“We skipped it,” Garrison says. (It won’t be the last time: “Once we hear those twinkles, we run for the remote,” she says in the CNN video.)
The princess of Christmas responded to a tweet suggesting that the ban of her song was another “war on Christmas.”
In the Tweet, Carey is wearing sexy armor, as if to say: Bring it on.
