Mariah Carey’s annual “It’s Time” video defrosted Christmas on TikTok again in 2026, and the numbers show how completely the ritual now owns the start of November. The 2026 video was posted shortly before midnight Eastern time on Saturday 31 October, and within 12 hours it had more than 18 million views and 85,000 comments, according to The Blast, which published its report on 1 November 2026. At one second past midnight on 1 November, Halloween ends and Christmas begins — at least, that is how it works on the American internet. The video opens with a black screen reading “New York City“, then “October 31st”, and a countdown starting at 11:58:13 PM. The camera pans into what looks like a typical New York dive bar, full of Halloween costumes and punk outfits. Carey performs “Hermit”, a track from a secret 1990s side project, identified by Entertainment Weekly as a song she wrote, produced and performed as a background vocalist in the 1990s, from the album “Someone’s Ugly Daughter”, released in 1995 under the band name Chick. The black screen reappears at 11:59:59 PM, and when the countdown hits midnight Carey belts out her iconic “It’s time” in her whistle register and transforms into the holiday version of herself, ending as the star on top of a Christmas tree.
A song with 16.2 million TikTok videos
By 5 November 2026, the song “All I Want for Christmas Is You” had accumulated 16.2 million TikTok videos all-time, according to Postdom’s scan of the platform, as reported by FamusNews. The hashtag #itstime alone had 414,046 videos, as fans tagged their own defrosting jokes, countdowns and first-listen reactions. The charts confirmed what the feeds were showing. On 5 November 2026, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” sat at number two among trending songs in the United States on TikTok, behind only a viral dance track, and it was still climbing, days before the holiday season had properly begun. Convosight, which tracks social moments, reports that between 21 October and 9 November, countdown posts and Christmas plans about Mariah Carey’s defrosting drew 51.9 million views from 1,400 creators across TikTok and Instagram Reels. The 51.9 million figure is a Convosight estimate for that window, not a TikTok total, and should not be mixed with the 16.2 million video count.
A tradition that started as a joke
The defrosting joke did not start with Mariah Carey. Fans began suggesting that the singer spends the warmer months frozen in a giant block of ice, waiting to be thawed when November arrives, and Carey embraced the humour, eventually incorporating it into her own seasonal announcement. The 2026 version is different in tone — a dive bar, a punk performance, a stage dive into the crowd — but the message is the same: Christmas season is officially open, and TikTok is where it opens.
