Mariah Carey’s application to be Queen of Christmas rejected

Mariah Carey has failed in her attempt to become officially recognised as the “Queen of Christmas” after not being permitted to trademark the title.

The singer, whose 1994 hit All I Want for Christmas is You is a festive staple, had wanted to “splash such phrases” as Queen of Christmas, QOC and Princess Christmas “onto a wide range of items”, said The Washington Post.

However, the US Patent and Trademark Office rejected the 53-year-old’s application after “her company did not respond to another singer’s opposition”, said the BBC.

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Festive singer Elizabeth Chan, who was dubbed Queen of Christmas by The New Yorker in 2018, launched a legal bid to block the trademark in August. She said it was wrong for an “individual to attempt to own and monopolize a nickname like Queen of Christmas for the purposes of abject materialism”. Chan, who was described by the New Yorker as “America’s most successful, and perhaps only, full-time Christmas-song singer-slash-composer”, added that she was fighting to “protect future Queens of Christmas”.

Carey’s Christmas hit has become “ubiquitous” around the festive period, wrote the Daily Mail, though it only reached No.1 in the UK for the first time in 2020. The paper said “it’s become customary” for her to promote her 90s album Merry Christmas “throughout the last two months of the year” and she had earned the “informal title of Queen of Christmas” from fans.

Another singer, Darlene Love, best known for the song Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), claimed she had been the Queen of Christmas before Carey and criticised the singer on Facebook, saying she had “been in the business for 52 years” and had “earned” the title.

Carey’s Christmas hit was also the subject of legal challenge by country singer/songwriter Andy Stone, who performs under the name Vince Vance in the band Vince Vance and the Valiants. He claimed in June that he “co-wrote a song with the same name five years earlier”, said the BBC, but he dropped his case earlier this month.