Mariah Carey will take her holiday stage show back across the Atlantic late in 2026, setting up a sequence of British arena performances before heading to the Mediterranean. Billed as the Christmastime tour, the short run represents her first run of holiday concerts in the UK in eight years, focusing on a seasonal catalogue that has gradually become one of the most dominant phenomena in modern pop chart history.
The schedule opens in the Midlands on November 27, when Carey appears at Birmingham's Utilita Arena. She then heads south to London for a performance at The O2 on November 30, before travelling north to Manchester to play the Co-op Live arena on December 2. From there, the production travels south for a single concert on December 8 at the MFCC in Ta' Qali, located in Attard on the island of Malta. Announcing the concerts online, Carey told fans, "My Christmastime tour is coming to the UK & Malta! I can't wait to celebrate with you all!" Pre-sales for the dates begin on Wednesday, September 23, continuing through Thursday, September 24, ahead of the general public sale at 10am BST on Friday, September 25.
British audiences have not seen Carey's holiday staging in person since 2018, when she brought an earlier incarnation of her festive tour through both the UK and continental Europe. Since that trek, she has kept the seasonal live production active elsewhere, including her Christmastime In Las Vegas residency staged last year.
The foundation of these late-autumn productions remains All I Want For Christmas Is You, the track from her 1994 album Merry Christmas that evolved into an unprecedented long-tail commercial hit. Carey has previously admitted that the concept initially gave her pause. When collaborators first suggested cutting a seasonal record so early in her recording career, she wondered whether holiday albums were traditionally reserved for artists further along in their trajectories. Ultimately, her personal fondness for Christmas won out. Looking back on the snowy promotional clip created to support the single, she remembered that while certain personal circumstances around that period were difficult, her genuine happiness during filming came through clearly on screen.
That early gamble yielded an unusually slow commercial build. Rather than peaking upon arrival, the single gathered momentum across two and a half decades, finally reaching Number One in the United States in 2019 and claiming the UK chart peak a year later in 2020. Carey marked the song's thirtieth anniversary in 2024 with a run of special commemorative releases, and its chart presence has continued unabated. Last December, thirty-one years after its initial debut, the track stretched Carey's existing record on the Billboard Hot 100 for the most cumulative weeks spent at Number One, reaching a twenty-second week at the summit. Celebrating the milestone on X, she wrote, "22!!!! Truly grateful for this Christmas gift," alongside festive emojis. The closing weeks of last year also resolved outstanding legal complications around the track, as a judge threw out a lawsuit aimed at the song and ordered Carey to be awarded $92,000.
The tour announcement follows an active start to 2026 for the singer, who opened the year performing in New York during the New Year's Rockin' Eve broadcast. She was also named on the shortlist for the 2026 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, though she was not ultimately chosen for induction with this year's class. These four European dates will put Carey back inside large-capacity rooms right as December opens, testing her most enduring seasonal material in front of the UK crowds who helped send it to the top of the charts.
