It’s a Mariah Christmas: Why We Love to Meme During the Holidays

Mariah portraits taken by Nino Muñoz for People magazine

The Analyze the Meme Series is dedicated to understanding what’s funny and why. Whether you’re a memester who wants to up your game, or one who dad jokes. Whether you are someone who likes internet culture, or someone who just likes to overthink everything – keep reading!

The Mariah meme is a megameme (not omega, not even omegalul but mega as in the “big ‘un”). A megameme is so large it can be observed all across the spacetime of cyberspace. These memes seem to transcend the usual meme cycles and come back again and again, evolving but remaining constant at some humorous core. The Mariah meme is a “big ‘un”.

The Mariah meme paradigm is narrowly about the song “All I Want for Christmas”, and more broadly about the onslaught of the holidays. The paradigm includes a host of sub-memes, each with a distinct and nuanced idea about Christmas, consumerism, retail work, and feeling like time is getting away from us.

The Mariah meme is a little dark. If you live in the States, Christmas is an unavoidable fact of winter no matter your beliefs or traditions. As much as people love the holiday, they also kinda…don’t really? In fact, many people don’t like it at all. Even the most holly-jolly and cheer-filled person has felt stressed and overworked preparing for months of festivities. So, if the Mariah meme is relatable to even the staunchest Christmas enthusiasts (excluding kids – they know not what comes), then we can imagine what a joy it is for the Scrooges among us.

But unlike Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickinson’s beloved Christmas Carol, many of our hearts will not be turned from churlish dislike of Christmas Present. And for us, we can choose from a host of ways to express our own personal brand of disenchantment through Mariah Carey.

The Mariah meme is very dramatic. But in a fun way. It gives us permission to be “anti-establishment” about the holidays and generally crotchety about sugar-plum fairies and figgy pudding – proclaiming “Holidays are hard work and we’re tired!”

In these memes, Mariah is often an antagonist. In the one below she is portrayed as the Terminator from the classic 1984 Schwarzenegger film (a callback template – here’s its history). Mariah, as a cybernetic assassin hunting down cutesy anime girls, is absurd on so many levels. In this metaphor, Mariah is a stand-in for the onslaught of Christmas, endlessly repetitive music, and all the negatives of the Christmas season. The metaphor paints the picture that yuletide festivities seem impossible to escape. Even though we desperately attempt to flee, we are pursued relentlessly. We fear for our lives and bodily safety. The end is near. This is all so overwrought that it’s delightful. IMO, it’s really funny – and gets a solid 3 ½ stars from me.

The Mariah memes I like the most are those where she is a jump-scare, quick and unexpected. Like Jason Momoa in the meme above, she pops out of nowhere, blindsiding us with the reality that it’s the end of the year and time has passed without us knowing. It speaks to a bittersweet ambivalence many of us have toward the season. Mariah is a harbinger of the end of the year and also new beginnings. She prompts us to reflect on a past that’s gone and plan the future we want.

These two memes showcase the breadth of the Mariah meme. Mariah constitutes a megameme because the meme has continued to change over time. It includes many metaphors that are varied and relatable to different people in different contexts. We see her on our feeds every year because of this algorithmic momentum. As the warmer months approach, she retreats, but we can feel secure that next year when the leaves start to fall and the sky again gets dark early in the evening, she will find us. And however we feel about Christmas she is a reminder of everything the season means to us.

Since it can be such a stressful time of year we have to take extra care of ourselves. If you need it, this SAMHSA article lists some tips and resources for keeping mentally healthy the holidays. If you become too sad, upset, or lonely make sure you reach out to a professional.

More Analyzing the Meme

The Analyze the Meme series intends to take humor entirely too seriously! We’ll talk about the mechanics of a joke using some light linguistic analysis and we’ll speculate on who’s cracking jokes, what makes it witticism, and why it makes us laugh.