All I Want For Christmas Is You *

It was Christmastime in 1997, I believe. I was seven, Liz was ten, Kate was twelve, and Emily was fourteen. And the four of us girls were talking and laughing and playing Christmas tapes in Emily's bedroom. For this was back, back, back in the day when everyone played tapes rather than CDs, but not so far back that we played records (although I did that too in my younger years).
But I digress.
We were in possession of a certain clear tape with green scrawl on it which none of us could read. It had previously belonged to one of Emily's friends, and when this friend taught Emily the Can Can, she made a tape of songs that Emily could dance the Can Can to and gave it to her.
The tape had basically only one song on it. ...Which repeated some three or four times in a row before a second song came on. And then the first song we play again several times, and then a third song came on, and then back to the first one again, and so on and so forth. You get the idea. These other songs had nothing to do with the Can Can, really, they were just Christmas songs that Emily liked, so the friend threw them in. But in comparison with the first one that played a grand total of twelve times on the tape, these other songs paled. We would listen to the Can Can song over and over and skip the others in between.
For a few days we just sang along with it, but of course Emily couldn't hold off teaching us this great dance for very long, and soon we were all as good at is as she was. Its very simple and very fun. And we loved it. We would stand in our little line, sometimes arranged in age order, or reverse age order, or in no order at all... and press play. And away we would go.
But we lost the tape one year, and we were devastated. We couldn't remember the song anymore, and without a song to dance it to, our love for the Can Can began to diminish.
Well, 2002 came along, and of course Christmas came with it, and I was rummaging around in the storage room, looking for my nutcracker (which had apparently not been put back into the nutcracker barrel the year before). I reached back behind the coats, hoping perhaps it had been placed on the top shelf, had been knocked behind the shelf and fallen down to the coat shelf below. I was right and found it in a moment, but I also found something else. I felt something small and rectangular at the tips of my fingers, and upon drawing it out, had the strangest sensation that I had seen this before. It was a small clear tape with unreadable green scrawl across the bottom of it. I took it upstairs with me, curious, and showed Emily. She recognised it immediately, and excitedly hurried to her room to put it on. And we heard it. That familiar song which five years before, we had been dancing crazily to in her bedroom.
That Christmas so many years ago ... dancing around in Emily's white room, the twinkle lights hanging around her window, trying not to kick anything over, and laughing so hard we collapsed in laughing heaps on her bed .... this memory is one of my favorite to think about when Christmastime comes around again.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the song.

All I Want For Christmas Is You
By Mariah Carey

All I Want For Christmas Is You - Mariah Carey