At one second past midnight on November 1, Halloween ends and Christmas begins — at least, that is how it works on the American internet. The pumpkins come down, the Mariah Carey comes out, and a single sentence takes over every feed in the country: “It’s time.” Every year, millions of Americans wait for Mariah Carey to declare the holiday season open, and every year she delivers, with a video that gets bigger, stranger, and more watched than the one before. In 2026, she did it again — and the internet, as always, was ready and waiting.
The Joke That Started It All
The “defrosting” joke did not start with Mariah Carey. It started with her fans. As early as October 2017, users on Twitter were joking that Carey spends the warmer months frozen in a giant block of ice, waiting to be thawed when the holiday season arrives. The image was simple and funny: the Queen of Christmas, preserved like a holiday decoration in storage, emerging only when the calendar says it is time. In November 2018, the joke spread widely as image macros on Instagram and other platforms, and it became an annual ritual — every October, the memes would return, with fans joking that scientists were monitoring the ice and that the defrosting process was about to begin.
The joke worked because it captured something everyone already felt. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is so closely tied to the holiday season that hearing it in, say, July feels wrong — and hearing it on November 1 feels exactly right. Fans extended the same joke to fellow Christmas mainstay Michael Bublé, imagining the two of them thawing out together after Halloween, like seasonal decorations coming out of the attic. The humor was affectionate, not mean: it treated Carey as a beloved institution, a human calendar who marks the turn of the seasons.
Carey Claims the Joke: 2019 to 2025
Carey first introduced the November 1 announcement in 2019, turning years of jokes about her reluctance to hear holiday music before Halloween into a recurring social media event. That first video showed her falling asleep on Halloween and receiving a midnight telephone call announcing that the holiday season had arrived. It was simple, charming, and perfectly timed — and it established the formula: Halloween ends, the clock strikes midnight, Mariah appears, Christmas begins.
Each year since, the production has grown more elaborate. In 2021, she appeared smashing pumpkins with a candy cane-striped baseball bat, transforming Halloween imagery into a dramatic festive entrance. By 2023, the production had become genuinely theatrical: Carey appeared frozen inside a block of ice while Halloween-costumed helpers attempted to thaw her out with hair dryers, and when the ice finally shattered, she emerged ready to welcome the holidays. That clip cemented the “defrosted” joke as an essential part of the annual celebration, and it was watched millions of times within days.
The 2024 video was widely called the best “It’s Time” yet, drawing tens of millions of viewers. The 2025 edition raised the stakes again: a collaboration with Sephora, directed by Joseph Kahn, starring actor and comedian Billy Eichner as an angry elf, which quickly passed 150 million views.
The 2026 Video, Moment by Moment
The 2026 edition, posted shortly before midnight Eastern time on Saturday, October 31, had a different vibe from previous years — and a surprise at its center. The video opens with a black screen reading “New York City,” then “October 31st.” A countdown appears, starting at 11:58:13 PM, and the camera pans into what looks like a typical New York dive bar, full of Halloween costumes and punk outfits. Then Carey takes the stage — in a plaid skirt, fishnet stockings, a studded leather jacket, and glittery purple lipstick, with red and pink streaked hair — and performs a song almost nobody expected.
The song is “Hermit,” a track from a secret 1990s side project. Entertainment Weekly identified it as a song Carey wrote, produced, and performed as a background vocalist in the 1990s, from the album “Someone’s Ugly Daughter,” released in 1995 under the band name Chick, in collaboration with her friend Clarissa Dane. Carey confirmed the project herself in her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey,” and has discussed recovering the recordings that feature her own lead vocals.
Then comes the moment everyone waits for. The black screen reappears, flashing 11:59:59 PM. When the countdown hits midnight, Carey belts out her iconic “It’s time” in her whistle register and instantly transforms into the holiday version of herself. As the camera pans out, we see that she is the star on top of a giant Christmas tree, in a sparkling Santa-inspired red outfit, while “All I Want for Christmas Is You” takes over the soundtrack. The video is a partnership with the brand Sol de Janeiro, and it ends with “It’s time!” spelled out in a candy-cane pattern.
TikTok Takes Over: The Trend by the Numbers
Carey’s video is the spark, but TikTok is the fire. The moment she posts, the platform erupts: creators film themselves reacting, dancing, lip-syncing, and decorating, all set to “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The trend was spotted in TikTok trend roundups on November 2, 2026, and by November 5, the song had accumulated 16.2 million TikTok videos all-time, according to Postdom’s scan of the platform — a staggering number for a single song, and a measure of how completely it dominates the app every holiday season. The hashtag #itstime alone had 414,046 videos, as fans tagged their own defrosting jokes, countdowns, and first-listen reactions.
The charts confirmed what the feeds were showing. On November 5, 2026, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” sat at number two among trending songs in the United States on TikTok, behind only a viral dance track — and it was still climbing, days before the holiday season had properly begun.
What is striking about the TikTok trend is how participatory it is. This is not a top-down campaign where a label pushes a song and fans passively listen. The “It’s Time” trend is something fans make themselves: the couple who films their first dance to the song in their kitchen, the student who decorates a dorm room at midnight, the parent who catches their kid’s face lighting up when the opening notes play. The hashtag is a shared language, and the song is the shared soundtrack. Carey provides the starting gun; TikTok provides the parade.
Why the Song Returns Every Year
None of this would work without the song itself. “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was released in October 1994 as part of Carey’s fourth studio album, “Merry Christmas.” Carey wrote it alongside Walter Afanasieff, and it was a success when it was first released, reaching the upper reaches of the charts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. But its real story began later, with the arrival of music streaming — which allowed a holiday song to return to the charts every year, without needing a new release, a new video, or a new campaign.
The song first reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 2019, a full 25 years after its original release — the longest gap between release and reaching number one in the chart’s history. It has returned to the top of the Hot 100 every holiday season since, and by the start of 2026 it had accumulated 22 non-consecutive weeks at number one, a record for a single at the time. It is the best-selling Christmas song in the United States, and it has reached number one in more than thirty countries.
Part of the song’s durability is musical: it is a bright, joyful, uptempo pop song with a melody that is easy to sing and hard to forget, and Carey’s vocal performance — including the famous high notes — gives it a thrill that never quite wears off. Part of it is emotional: the song is about wanting a person, not a thing, for Christmas, and that sentiment lands whether you are eight or eighty. And part of it is structural: streaming and social media reward songs that return on a schedule, and no song returns on a more reliable schedule than this one. Every November 1, the whole machine starts up again, and the song climbs the charts like clockwork.
Why “It’s Time” Works So Well
The genius of “It’s Time” is that it solves a problem every artist and every brand faces: how do you get the world’s attention at a moment of your choosing? Most artists fight for attention in mid-December, when every other holiday song, movie, and advertisement is competing for the same ears. Carey claims the entire two-month runway instead. By owning November 1 — the first moment Christmas becomes socially acceptable — she gets the first word, the biggest stage, and the longest run-up. The second her video drops, millions stream the track, and the snowball effect carries it right back up the charts.
The format helps, too. The video is short, visual, and instantly shareable — built for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, not for television. It rewards repeat viewing, because fans want to catch the details: the costume, the cameo, the song choice, the transformation. And it creates anticipation, which is the most valuable currency on social media. Fans do not just watch the video; they wait for it, count down to it, and speculate about it for weeks beforehand. That waiting is itself a form of engagement, and it is something no amount of advertising can buy.
What Happens Next
The “It’s Time” video is only the beginning of Carey’s Christmas season. Her Christmastime tour heads overseas this month, with stops in Brazil and the United Kingdom before wrapping in Malta in early December. The UK run begins in Birmingham in late November, moves to London’s O2 Arena, and concludes in Manchester. Alongside the tour, Carey is fronting a new Gucci holiday campaign, a short film in which she stars in a butterfly-print gown and delivers the song’s famous line straight to camera — a reminder that the Queen of Christmas is also one of fashion’s most bankable holiday faces.
For the rest of us, the next eight weeks will follow a familiar pattern. The song will climb the streaming charts, then the Billboard Hot 100, then the radio charts. TikTok will fill up with Christmas content set to its opening notes. Radio stations will flip to all-Christmas formats, and stores, malls, and coffee shops will play it on repeat. She decided at midnight on November 1. It is time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the “It’s Time” trend?
“It’s Time” is Mariah Carey’s annual November 1 announcement that the Christmas season has begun. She posts a short video at midnight, declares “It’s time,” and launches into “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Why do people say Mariah Carey “defrosts” every year?
The joke is that Carey spends the warmer months frozen in a block of ice and thaws out when Christmas approaches. It began as a fan meme in 2017 and spread widely in 2018. Carey embraced the joke and built it into her annual videos, most famously in 2023, when she appeared frozen in a block of ice and shattered her way out.
When did the “It’s Time” tradition start?
Carey first introduced the November 1 announcement in 2019, with a video showing her falling asleep on Halloween and receiving a midnight call that the holiday season had arrived.
What happened in the 2026 “It’s Time” video?
The 2026 video opened in a New York City dive bar on October 31, with a countdown to midnight. Carey performed “Hermit,” a song from her secret 1990s rock project Chick, in punk attire, then stage-dived into the crowd. At midnight she declared “It’s time” and transformed into a Christmas tree topper as “All I Want for Christmas Is You” began to play. It passed 18 million views within 12 hours.
How popular is “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on TikTok?
As of November 5, 2026, the song had 16.2 million TikTok videos all-time, according to Postdom’s scan, and the hashtag #itstime had 414,046 videos. On November 5, the song ranked number two among trending songs in the United States on TikTok.
How successful is the song on the charts?
Released in 1994, the song first reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 2019, 25 years after its release. It is the best-selling Christmas song in the United States.