Christmas music as a full time format is a relatively recent phenomenon. Sometimes it has been used as a gimmick, or as window-dressing for a station's format change, or both. In St. Louis the format had its beginnings on KEZK in the early 1990's, with one hour devoted to Christmas music in the evenings. The annual format as we know it now became popuar after 2000.
In previous years, stations would slowly add Christmas music after Thanksgiving, and add more music to their rotation as Christmas day approached. By the 23'rd many stations would go 24 hour Christmas music (my first memory of this kind of programming was KXOK's "Christmas Spectacular").
In 1984, KS-94 (KSD-FM) ran a syndicated program called "The Christmas Album." That year, I rolled tape on the show while I was finishing some last minute gift wrapping. Recently I found this cassette (a TDK SA-90) and digitized it. The audio chain KS-94 had was something I really enjoyed. It had a bright and wide stereo sound field, with very minimal distortion (as a side note, the station maintained their high quality audio chain as a classic rock station, although that 'bright' sounding audio was removed to better suit their format).
Here is 90 minutes of KS-94 from the early morning hours of Christmas Day, 1984. The mp3 file is 320/44.1 and can be found at these links:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IeF7iUxTRJPYscXCQl7sh5GIYdYfy9m/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y9flKNsid4M5MXBjTPxUs2z8usXWq1Uu/view?usp=sharing
In previous years, stations would slowly add Christmas music after Thanksgiving, and add more music to their rotation as Christmas day approached. By the 23'rd many stations would go 24 hour Christmas music (my first memory of this kind of programming was KXOK's "Christmas Spectacular").
In 1984, KS-94 (KSD-FM) ran a syndicated program called "The Christmas Album." That year, I rolled tape on the show while I was finishing some last minute gift wrapping. Recently I found this cassette (a TDK SA-90) and digitized it. The audio chain KS-94 had was something I really enjoyed. It had a bright and wide stereo sound field, with very minimal distortion (as a side note, the station maintained their high quality audio chain as a classic rock station, although that 'bright' sounding audio was removed to better suit their format).
Here is 90 minutes of KS-94 from the early morning hours of Christmas Day, 1984. The mp3 file is 320/44.1 and can be found at these links:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/18IeF7iUxTRJPYscXCQl7sh5GIYdYfy9m/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y9flKNsid4M5MXBjTPxUs2z8usXWq1Uu/view?usp=sharing