Mariah Carey recently revealed her love for Christmas stems from her childhood.

“When you grow up with a messed-up life and then you’re able to have this transformation where you can make your life what you want it to be? That is joy for me,” the singer told W Magazine. “That’s why I want my kids to have everything they can have. I want them to be able to understand that they can be anything they want to be.”

Carey also said that she knows people tend to look at her as the “Christmas girl,” but that she's taken on the role because it genuinely makes her happy —something she didn't always feel growing up. “People think I had this princess-style life or whatever, a kind of fairy-tale existence where I just emerged, like, ‘Here I am!’ And that is not what it is,” she said.

The “All I Want For Christmas Is You” singer wrote about her tumultuous upbringing in her 2020 memoir The Meaning of Mariah Carey. She claimed her big brother was so abusive that she once had to call the cops on him for trying to hurt their mother. She also alleged that her older sister drugged her with a Valium when she was 12-years-old and left her with one of her sister's boyfriends.