The Mariah Carey It’s Time video returned at midnight on November 1, and this year the annual Christmas kickoff opened in a New York punk club instead of a winter scene. Before the tree, the sleigh bells and the signature whistle note, Carey performed a song from her secret 1995 rock album, stage dived into a crowd, and only then declared the holiday season open.
The clip, posted to her social channels with the caption “IT’S TIME!!!!”, continues a tradition Carey started in 2019 and has turned into pop culture’s most reliable seasonal handoff. This edition was made in partnership with Sol de Janeiro, and it uses its first minute to pull a nearly thirty year old side project back into the spotlight.
Inside The Mariah Carey It’s Time Video
The video opens with on screen titles placing the scene in New York City on October 31, a countdown clock sitting at 11:58 p.m. The camera moves through a dive bar full of Halloween costumes and punk outfits before it finds Carey on stage in a plaid skirt, fishnet stockings, a studded leather jacket and glittery purple lipstick, with red and pink streaked hair. She is performing “Hermit,” and she performs it like a club set, not a costume gag, finishing the number with a stage dive as the clock runs down.
At midnight the screen cuts to black, Carey delivers the “It’s time” line in her whistle register, and the transformation lands: a snowy scene, a glittering Santa inspired red outfit, and Carey perched on top of a giant Christmas tree as its star while “All I Want for Christmas Is You” takes over the soundtrack. The joke of the structure is the contrast. Punk Mariah is the last night of October; Christmas Mariah is the first second of November, and the video treats the switch as a hard cut rather than a fade.
IT’S TIME!!!!
The 1995 Rock Album Behind The Punk Opening
“Hermit” is not a random cover choice. Entertainment Weekly identified the song as a track from Someone’s Ugly Daughter, the alternative rock album released in 1995 under the band name Chick. Carey recorded the project in secret while she was making Daydream, working with her friend Clarissa Dane, and the album came out with Dane’s lead vocals in place of her own. For twenty five years the story circulated as a rumour; Carey confirmed it herself in her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, and later discussed recovering the recordings that feature her own lead vocals.
That version of the album remains unreleased, and the new video does not announce a date for it. What it does is put the Chick era on her biggest annual stage. Millions of viewers who know Carey only as the voice of the holidays just watched her front a punk band, and the deep cut they heard is now the most searched corner of her catalogue this week. As a piece of catalogue strategy inside a Christmas video, it is remarkably efficient.
A Tradition That Started As A Joke
The annual video began as an answer to an internet running gag. The joke that Carey hibernates all year and defrosts on November 1 first appeared on Twitter in 2017 and went viral the following year. Carey has told The New York Times that people kept asking her when it was acceptable to put up decorations and play holiday music, so in 2019 she answered the question directly: her first It’s Time video showed her asleep in a Halloween costume, woken by a call from Santa at 12:01 a.m.
Every year since, the production has grown. The 2025 edition was a Sephora collaboration directed by Joseph Kahn. This year’s Sol de Janeiro partnership keeps the commercial frame, but the punk opening is the most personal creative choice the series has carried, because it is built on her own buried recording history rather than a brand brief.
The Song Waiting At The Top Of The Tree
The destination of every It’s Time video is the same song. “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” co written and co produced by Carey with Walter Afanasieff, was released in 1994 on her first holiday album, Merry Christmas. It first topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019, twenty five years after release, and it enters this holiday season with 22 nonconsecutive weeks at number one on that chart. No other seasonal record operates on that scale, and the annual video functions as its official starting gun.
The video also opens a working season rather than a single news cycle. Carey’s Christmastime tour takes the show to the United Kingdom and Europe from November 27, with listed dates in Birmingham on November 27, London on November 30 and Manchester on December 2, plus a Malta performance on December 8. Between the tour, the streaming surge that follows the video every year, and a punk rock footnote from 1995 suddenly back in circulation, the 2026 edition of It’s Time is doing more work than any of its predecessors.
