Mariah Carey's “All I Want for Christmas Is You” turns 30. Here's the New Jersey connection.

Like every year, Mariah Carey “defrosted” her big Christmas hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” today.

All she has to do is sing two words in her trademark falsetto and the bells start ringing:

“It’s time!!!”

But did you know the New Jersey connection?

As the song celebrates its 30th anniversary at Christmas 2024 and as we prepare to hear it another 58 billion times this festive season, here is a look at the song's local connections.

A year before the release of “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Carey filmed the song's music video in Jersey.

The superstar singer, who has yet to be named Christmas queen, headed to Fairy Tale Forest, a children's attraction in Oak Ridge. The family destination had just the Christmas vibe she needed for the video, which she also directed.

Carey filmed the video, which has been viewed 787 million times on YouTube, in Fairy Tale Forest's Christmas Village.

You can see the village snowman sequence starting at the 2:37 mark in the music video (see below).

Actors in elf costumes flocked to Christmas in Jersey as snowblowers were set up for the video. This part of the video took a day to shoot.

Larry Woehle was there.

“What I remember is how tall Mariah was,” he tells NJ Advance Media of Carey, who is reportedly around 5-foot-10.

“Wow, you’re really tall,” he said to her, and from what he remembers, she laughed.

Carey showed up with a large bus and a “huge entourage,” says Woehle, 62, who was working in maintenance at Fairy Tale Forest at the time.

“She was nice to everyone,” he says.

Although he didn't know Carey or her music well at the time, he asked her to sign an autograph for his newborn daughter.

Woehle remembers the snowman in the park and Carey frolicking in the frost.

“She was dancing around and throwing snow in the air,” he says.

“It was cold, there was a lot of snow on the ground,” he says – he remembers thinking he couldn’t wait for everything to be packed up.

Woehle, who lives in Blauvelt, Rockland County, also remembers the music video entourage enjoying a turkey dinner at Fairy Tale Forest.

“Mariah wanted salmon, so I had to go out and find salmon,” he says.

Former Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola, who was married to Carey at the time – they married earlier this year and separated in 1997 – dressed up as Santa Claus for the video.

Paul Woehle Sr., a German immigrant, built the fairy tale forest in the 1950s, inspired by Grimm's fairy tales. The attraction, which had been closed since 2003, was renovated and reopened in August.

“All I Want for Christmas Is You,” written by Carey and Walter Afanasieff, was the lead single from Carey's 1994 holiday album Merry Christmas and had such staying power that it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019. 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Carey re-released the song at midnight on November 1st to announce the holiday season and released a video (shown below) in which she wears a Morticia Addams look to mark the transition from the Halloween season to the countdown to the holiday season to mark.

The song has a very good chance of conquering the charts for the sixth time in a row.

You can watch Carey sing the Christmas favorite live.

Mariah Carey's Christmas tour takes place on December 13th at the Prudential Center in Newark.