All I Want for Christmas Is You peak chart position

As Mariah Carey's 'All I Want for Christmas Is You' climbed higher and higher on the charts each December — eventually reaching number one in 2019, a full 25 years after its release — per capita chicken consumption in the relevant market also increased. The r-value is 0.97 across eleven years. It would be festive to suggest that hearing the song inspires chicken cravings, but the more likely explanation is that Mariah Carey's chart rehabilitation and the global shift to chicken as the default protein are both just things that were happening at the same time. The universe is not usually this festive.

Mariah Carey's song climbed the charts progressively from 2012 to 2022 as streaming normalization weighted catalog music more heavily in chart calculations and as the song became a genuine cultural institution — peaking at UK number one in 2019 and subsequent years. Per capita chicken consumption has grown steadily across Western markets and globally as chicken became the world's most consumed meat, driven by price, health perceptions, and its versatility. Both trends represent things incrementally improving their position over time, which is the structural precondition for correlation regardless of content.

Progress and improvement in unrelated domains will always find each other in the data. The chart correlation between a Christmas classic's belated vindication and the global rise of the chicken is touching, meaningless, and somehow very 2020s.