A Christmas album is usually a small thing: a few carols, a bow on the year, a gift for fans between tours. Céline Dion, the French-Canadian singer who had spent the decade climbing from Quebec ballads to global pop dominance, turned the format into something closer to a blockbuster. On October 30, 1998, she released These Are Special Times, her seventeenth studio album and her first Christmas record in English, across Europe on Columbia Records.
Recording across five cities
The scope was unusual from the start. Recording sessions that year stretched across studios in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Vancouver and beyond. Seven of the songs were new, written specifically for the project, rather than the usual mix of old standards. That meant Dion was not just covering familiar holiday ground; she was building a new holiday canon around her own voice.
The collaborations made the ambition plain. The lead single paired her with R. Kelly on 'I'm Your Angel', a duet he wrote and produced himself. 'The Prayer' brought in the Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli for a bilingual ballad that would later win a Golden Globe. Even the older material got fresh weight: a new arrangement of 'Blue Christmas' featured the jazz pianist Diana Krall on acoustic piano, and family members of Dion joined in on 'Feliz Navidad'.
First-week sales and a CBS special
The commercial response was immediate and loud. The album entered the Billboard 200 at number four with 126,000 copies sold in its first week, then climbed to third the next week with 163,000. A CBS television special broadcast in late November pushed sales to 409,000 copies in a single week. The special drew more than sixteen million viewers, a number that made the album feel less like a seasonal release and more like a cultural moment.
The special drew more than sixteen million viewers, a number that made the album feel less like a seasonal release and more like a cultural moment.
The single 'I'm Your Angel' reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for six weeks. In Canada the album went diamond, and worldwide sales are estimated at more than 12 million copies. On November 16, 2008, the record became the first Christmas album by a woman to surpass 5 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. In Canada the album reached number one and was certified diamond by CRIA. Carrie Underwood later said Dion's interpretation of 'O Holy Night' influenced her own version.
The 2022 vinyl reissue and its erasure
The album's afterlife has been just as telling. In November 2022, when the record was reissued as a limited edition on two gold vinyl LPs, the tracklist changed: 'I'm Your Angel' disappeared, replaced by 'I Met an Angel (On Christmas Day)' because of R. Kelly's legal problems. Digital versions were updated the same way. The album's biggest hit became, in effect, an erasure.
Yet the songs kept traveling. Christina Aguilera covered the title track 'These Are the Special Times' in 2000. Dion had made a Christmas album that behaved like a regular pop blockbuster, and the industry noticed. MTV named the album one of the greatest Christmas albums of all time. In 2000 it was nominated for Juno Awards for best album and best international album.
The question the title asks was answered long before the final track faded. Why did Céline Dion's Christmas album become a pop event? Because she treated it like one: original songs, major duet partners, a television special, and a promotional machine built for a number-one single. The result was a holiday record that still gets reissued, revised and covered decades later.