Walter Afanasieff recently appeared on the Hot Takes & Deep Dives with Jess Rothschild podcast, in which he revealed how he and Carey co-created the song after collaborating on her 1993 album Music Box. Revealing more details about the. same, ?Walter claimed that while originally they were on the same page about the song, 10 years ago, there was suddenly an "alternate story" being told.

Speaking about Mariah Carey taking credit for it, he said, "When she started to hint at the fact that, 'Oh, I wrote that song when I was a little girl!' But why weren’t you saying that for 12 or 13 or 15 years prior to that? So it just sort of developed in her mind." At another point in the interview he also claimed, she just "doesn’t understand music."

In the same podcast interview, Afanasieff also claimed that Mariah doesn't know how to play instruments and said, "She doesn’t play anything, she doesn’t play keyboard or piano. She doesn’t understand music, she doesn’t know chord changes and music theory or anything like that. She doesn’t know a diminished chord from a minor seventh chord to a major seventh chord", via New York Post. Adding on, he further claimed that her writing a "very complicated chord-structured song with her finger on a Casio keyboard when she was a little girl, it’s kind of a tall tale"

Marah Carey had previously told Billboard in a 2017 interview that she came up with All I Want For Christmas when she was just a kid. She said, "I am proud of this song that I wrote basically as a kid on my little Casio keyboard." ?As per Walter's claims, they came up with the song together while working on three songs for her Christmas album, Merry Christmas.