Under “Mariah Carey’s Christmas Time,” Mariah Carey will honor the 30th anniversary of her “Merry Christmas” album and the iconic single that came wrapped inside it, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” with a 20-city Christmas tour this fall.
Beginning in early November with three events in southern California, the Live Nation-produced tour will finish with three events in the New York/New Jersey region in mid-December. She will be playing a tour premiere on Nov. 6 at Highland’s Yaamava Theater, an intimate teaser for a much larger show she will be doing on Nov. 8 at the Hollywood Bowl, followed by a Nov. 13 gig at the Acrisure Arena in the Palm Springs area in the Los Angeles area and surroundings.
Close to home for Carey, bringing the tour to an end will be concerts on Dec. 13 at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ, Dec. 15 at the UBS Arena in Belmont Park, NY, and lastly Dec. 17 in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.
She will be in between visiting Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Nashville, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Boston, and other locations. (Refer to the whole schedule below.)
Beginning with a Verizon presale that opens Aug. 6, tickets for “Mariah Carey’s Christmas Time” will be made available via the typical staggered presale dates and other early offerings that lead up to a general on-sale Aug. 9 at 10 a.m. local time at LiveNation.com. Vipnation.com has details about VIP packages.
“Mariah Carey’s Christmas Time” will follow a similar pattern of combining Christmas cuisine with the singer’s non-seasonal classics, following the success of a shorter, 13-city holiday tour Carey undertook in 2023, “Merry Christmas One and All!!.” Although most of the setlist on last year’s tour consisted of festive songs, the concluding stretch of the event featured a run of other material including “Hero,,” “We Belong Together,” and a huge hits medley.
Though her first and largest Christmas album was released three decades ago, Carey did not start honoring that material with particular live events until 2014, following a themed residency at the Beacon Theater in New York. That evolved into a series of brief excursions in later years, including a four-date mini-tour in 2019 shot for a CBS special, “Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas to All!,”
The emphasis on Christmas shows has matched the slow, tardy ascent of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” as a recurring No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100 each December. Though it has peaked at No. 1 every year following, the song did not reach the top spot on that chart until 2019, 20 years after its release.
There have been and will be plenty of chances this year for anyone who wants to see Carey but not deal quite so much with Christmas as the singer has been holding an occasional “Celebration of Mimi” residency in Las Vegas, at Dolby Live at Park MGM. Beginning April 12, that run of concerts includes five more shows scheduled in the first half of August before pausing and then resurfacing in January and February 2025.