I’ve spent much of my\u00a0 life on the radio,\u00a0playing music.\u00a0 When the Christmas songs start, the radio station staff revolts.\u00a0 Here’s a scene from a typical radio programming meeting, where on-air people wrestled with the Program Director,\u00a0 in the good old days\u00a0before a computer chose the music you heard.<\/p>\n
PD:\u00a0 So guys – and Anita – you’ll notice on your playlist that we’re rotating one Christmas song each hour starting…<\/p>\n
ME: …Couldn’t 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’ll play four\u00a0an hour.<\/p>\n
ME:\u00a0 Couldn’t 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’ll be calling in sick.<\/p>\n ANOTHER ON-AIR PERSON:\u00a0 You can’t call in sick, because I’m scheduling all my dental work now.\u00a0 I’ll be gone for a month.<\/p>\n The foregoing is only slightly exaggerated.\u00a0 I haven’t met many radio people who like Christmas music as much as I do.\u00a0 For me, Thanksgiving starts my own Christmas music marathon.\u00a0 Give me a couple of songs and three lights that twinkle and I’m happy.<\/p>\n After years of local radio, I had the great opportunity 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 it was more work than I could have imagined.<\/p>\n We began making our Christmas show while the weather said it was still summer.\u00a0 Show prep (a rather unimaginative term that means exactly what it sounds like) included knowing a lot about the music we’d be playing.\u00a0 We also knew many of the artists who wrote and performed the music and had been pre-recording their holiday greetings all year when they were in our studio.<\/p>\n For our first annual Christmas Is Something Special<\/em>, we’d back-timed, to the second, all the music and scripts.\u00a0 Radio people live by the second hand.\u00a0 One of our pre-recorded “bits” for this show came from another broadcaster.\u00a0 My family loved a song called Christmas Isn’t Christmas Without You<\/em>, found on an album sent to me by a record company years before.\u00a0 Researching the song for this show, I was surprised to learn it was written by a fellow radio person, Allan Hotlen.<\/p>\n Allan and I\u00a0met when he was Program Director at (then legendary) KSFO in San Francisco, and now here he was, right around the corner at a station in Los Angeles.\u00a0 I asked him to tell how he came to write this song and he sent over a perfect recorded “talk-up” to his own song.<\/p>\n John Schneider was the guest co-host for this Christmas extravaganza.\u00a0 He’d appeared on my\u00a0show and had become a friend.\u00a0 Generally we featured a celebrity guest for only the first hour of each week, but this time, John would be with us for all four hours.\u00a0<\/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 a small plug-in Christmas tree.\u00a0John contributed warm apple fritters he picked up at that place he knew in Burbank.\u00a0 We took our positions at the microphones.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n