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Christmas music rotations

O

oldies guy

Back in the days of vacuum tubes, smoking in the control rooms and vinyl records, being an eighteen year old dj at your favorite local AM rocker involved inserting Christmas songs into the song rotations. The PD or station manager usually sent out a mimeographed notice the week after Thanksgiving giving us instructions as how often we should insert a Christmas song between the Top 40 survey records. By one week before Christmas, I believe we were up to four Christmas songs per hour, two every half hour. A song, A song, B song, insert. By the time Christmas Eve came around, we were pretty heavy in the Christmas rotation. Christmas Eve 18:00 - 12:00 Christmas day was pretty much all Christmas music with A songs thrown in. After 12:00 we pretty much went back into format. Memories of working 12 hr shifts at the board, no commercial spots, plenty of PSA's and bad coffee.
 
It was interesting back then to hear a Bing Crosby/Frank Sinatra/Nat Cole Crhistmas song played on a Top 40 station. For me, not being a rock & roll fan, I kind of enjoyed it.
 
I recall that if you were the teenage board-op just dying to get your big on-air break,
it would typically come in the form of a double-shift on Christmas Day. If the station was
live, that is. Often times it was just more board op work playing pre-recorded day long Christmas
programming.

Personally if I have to sit through Christmas in Killarney just one more time, I think my
head is gonna explode...
 
I worked a Christmas Day night at a country/western station and played all Christmas songs from LP's. There was quite a bit to choose from and I was easily able to fill the time slot with the Holiday music. As I remember, most of it was very close to middle-of-the-road type music (Jimmy Dean, Connie Smith, etc.) which the station had a good supply of. A part of that was the station also originated both high school and college basketball games and management wanted such songs played both before and after those broadcasts to try and keep listeners tuned in rather than hitting them with blue grass or older country recorded material.
 
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