Christmas Music

Last Friday, I was sitting in a local restaurant enjoying my traditional end of week lunch when all of a sudden, I heard IT! What is that?!? Some hip hop version of Sleighride! Really! It’s only November Second already, only two days past Halloween. Twenty days until Thanksgiving and some fool is playing Christmas Music. I almost choked on my salad.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Christmas Music. I just don’t want a two month supply of it.

The cynical side of me thinks that is all a plot to make the Christmas buying season longer every year. Indeed I saw a story on the news the other day that said that Black Friday, the traditional big kickoff to the season the day after Thanksgiving is becoming a thing of the past. The story said the retailers were running their specials, which used to be run on Black Friday, are being run now. Furthermore the story warned that stocks of some of this year’s hot items may not be available come Black Friday. Trust me, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I may become one if this kind of thing keeps happening.

SiriusXM announced on October 22 that they are offering no fewer than 16 commercial-free holiday music channels this year and some of them went on the air last Thursday. For example, their Holiday Traditions Channel is now on Channel 3 and Holly is now on Channel 4. So if you are a fan on Forties on Four, you need to find the new channel for your music. Hint; it is Channel 73.

Which brings up something I have noticed in the past; if your favorite radio station goes “All Christmas” soon, you had better start a search for a new station. Yours is probably going away. It seems the corporate programmers use the pretense of going “All Christmas” to avoid the audience fallout that usually accompanies a format change. I’m not saying this happens all the time but for stations going “All Christmas” a high percentage of them do not go back to their old format when Santa hangs his hat on the mantelpiece at the North Pole and takes his long winter’s nap.

One thing I do know; when I see a station go “All Christmas” there is usually an accompanying flurry of resume and air check being sent out by the few live DJs still working there to cover their bases. It is not like it was back in the day when there was always another “Mom and Pop” over in the next county or the next state that is looking for someone to cover that afternoon board shift. With today’s focus on the bottom line and use of automation, live radio DJs are fading into the veils of mist in our memories.

These “All Christmas” periods are not good for the artists who perform the music that the radio stations play. If they are unfortunate enough to be climbing up the charts or the station’s rotation when the transition comes, their efforts are likely to be stale and falling out of popularity when the end of the Christmas season arrives.

OK, you are thinking, you say you like Christmas and holiday music, how should we mix the sounds of the season into the record rotation. My response, in my most curmudgeonly of voices is to tell you how we did it in the old days.

The Friday after Thanksgiving, back in the 60s, the program director or the music director would bring a cardboard box that contained the teletype paper for our AP/UPI machines into the control room and place it on the floor in front of the cart machines. This box would be filled to the brim with 45’s of all the holiday music that was in our rotation that year. That music covered the years from the 30’s to the present time. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” was nestled right next to Bob B. Soxx And The Blue Jeans’ “The Bells of St. Mary”. On the other side of the box were Christmas offerings from Elvis, The Supremes, The Drifters and many more. It was better than sugar cookies and eggnog. To make it all more festive, there were red, green, blue, yellow and even orange colored records in that box. It looked like Christmas decorations! We were in heaven.

The instructions were to start by playing one Christmas song every half hour the first week, and add another to every half hour every week until on Christmas Eve, at 6 PM we were “wall to wall” Christmas music. We stayed there for 24 hours and then started gradually reducing the Christmas music in the mix until it was finally gone just before midnight on New Year’s Eve! This way, we didn’t go cold turkey on the folks that love Christmas music.

So in my old school way of thinking, this is the way Christmas Music should be played every year. So look for your favorite Christmas oldies to appear in the mix on my shows the Monday after Thanksgiving and stick around until the weekend before New Year’s Day. That’s just the way I roll. Oh MY!