By Anita Garner<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve spent much of my\u00a0 life on the radio,\u00a0playing music.\u00a0 Every year when the Christmas songs started, the radio station staff revolted.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a scene from a typical radio programming meeting, where on-air people wrestled with the Program Director (in the\u00a0days\u00a0before a computer picked the music – and before every city had a radio station that plays continuous holiday music starting at Thanksgiving.)<\/p>\n
PD:\u00a0 So guys – and Anita – you\u2019ll notice on your playlist that we\u2019re rotating one Christmas song each hour starting\u2026<\/p>\n
ME: \u2026Couldn\u2019t we play more than one per\u00a0hour?<\/p>\n
EVERYONE ELSE:\u00a0 No!<\/p>\n
PD:\u00a0 And then by week three of the season, we\u2019ll play four\u00a0an hour.<\/p>\n
ME:\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t we play more than that?<\/p>\n
EVERYONE ELSE:\u00a0 Shut up!<\/em><\/p>\n ME:\u00a0 Could I have more Christmas music on my<\/em> show?<\/p>\n ON-AIR PERSON:\u00a0 I\u2019ll be calling in sick.<\/p>\n ANOTHER ON-AIR PERSON:\u00a0 You can\u2019t call in sick, because I\u2019m scheduling all my dental work now.\u00a0 I\u2019ll be gone for a month.<\/p>\n The foregoing is only slightly exaggerated.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t met many radio people who like Christmas music as much as I do.\u00a0 For me, it can’t start too soon.\u00a0Give me a couple of songs and three lights that twinkle and I\u2019m happy.<\/p>\n After years of being on the air,\u00a0 I had the\u00a0opportunity to host a nationally syndicated show.\u00a0 Something Special<\/em> aired on stations around the U.S.\u00a0 I was also writer and producer for this weekly four-hour radio magazine and we began\u00a0making our Christmas show while the weather said it was still summer.<\/p>\n Show prep (a rather unimaginative term that means exactly what it sounds like) included knowing a lot about the music we\u2019d be playing.\u00a0 No problem here.\u00a0 I love Christmas music and in addition to the music sent over by the record companies, I also have a\u00a0big personal collection.\u00a0 We\u00a0knew many of the artists who\u00a0performed the music and had been pre-recording their holiday greetings all year when they were in our studio.<\/p>\n John Schneider was the guest co-host for this Christmas extravaganza.\u00a0 He\u2019d become a friend through my\u00a0daily radio show in Los Angeles.\u00a0Generally the new show\u00a0featured a celebrity guest for only the first hour of each week, but at Christmas\u00a0John would be with us for all four hours.<\/p>\n John arrived with one of his ever-present dogs – maybe it was Smudge or, God rest her soul, Gracie.\u00a0 Cathleen (my daughter worked on the show) baked Christmas cookies and brought in a small\u00a0Christmas tree.\u00a0John contributed warm apple fritters he picked up at that place he knew in Burbank.\u00a0 We took our positions at the microphones.<\/p>\n We sailed right along.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember any re-takes.\u00a0 It\u2019s one of my favorite radio shows ever.\u00a0 I play it again every year by the light of my plug-in-desktop tree with the twinkle lights. Sometimes I\u00a0play it in the middle of summer,\u00a0or whenever in the words of a favorite\u00a0song, I “need a little Christmas.”<\/p>\n Anita Garner 2008<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"