All I Want for Christmas Is You peak chart position

Between 2012 and 2022, Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" climbed to increasingly higher peak chart positions each December while Americans ate increasingly more pork per capita, a relationship so unexpected that one suspects the universe is simply amusing itself at this point. The song, which was released in 1994 and has been getting more popular every year since roughly 2017, appears to have developed a statistical relationship with ham consumption that neither Carey nor the pork industry could have anticipated. One does not normally associate vocal range with charcuterie.

The song's chart resurgence is a streaming-era phenomenon: as Spotify and Apple Music grew, seasonal listening patterns became more concentrated, pushing Christmas songs to unprecedented chart heights each December—the track finally hit number one in 2019, twenty-five years after release. Pork consumption, meanwhile, has been on a modest upward trajectory as bacon culture peaked, pulled pork became a fast-casual staple, and per capita consumption rose from about 46 pounds to over 52 pounds annually. Both trends are expressions of cultural recycling: Americans rediscovering a 1994 pop song and rediscovering pork as a versatile protein at the same time, for the same reason—algorithms and food media both reward repetition and familiarity.

Eleven data points connecting Mariah Carey to pork consumption is the kind of correlation that justifies this website's entire existence. The song gets bigger every Christmas, the pork consumption creeps upward every year, and the connection between them is nothing more than a shared decade and the human appetite for things that are comforting and familiar. All she wants for Christmas is you. What she's getting is a statistical relationship with ham.