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What Are Some Of Your Greatest Radio Christmas Memories

A

allenv

I talking about working at a station around Christmas time or Christmas programming where you worked.... Here are a few of mine...

1983 WGHB Farmville-My first radio Christmas....Dec 23rd 1983 was my first remote
at Maxway in Farmville...I worked Christmas Eve so my friend Sammy Westbrook could be at home with his family for the first time in many years..He was moved to tears and so was I..It turned very cold on Christmas Eve and we simulcasted with
WRQR and ran The Best of Radio's Christmas Past...A Great Show....

1984 My friend John Creech brought his massive Christmas collection in and he Al Cannon and myself had a blast and I got my first really fancy Kenwood Stereo..

1989 The snow of DEC 23rd and 24th..I was not scheduled to work but someone could not make it in and I worked 7-12midnight watched it snow and played Christmas tunes...

There are a few more these are some early memories. 1983 was 25 years ago DAMN
it doesn't seem possible.

Allen
 
Christmas 1984...was working at the old WKIX 850 when it was country. Normally I worked overnights, but Christmas Day I was scheduled for 6AM-3PM, running the all-Christmas show. Reel after reel after reel of Christmas music, broken up by IDs and the occasional spot. No phone calls, nobody else there except the guy down the hall at WYYD.

After nine hours of that, I was so tired I had to remind myself to breathe. Then my brother came by and picked me up, and we drove three hours to have Christmas with my family Down East.
 
1997 my wife was expecting our first child and I was working Christmas Eve at 97.7 The Bear..Several people came by the studio with gifts for me,the wife and the baby.. I put them on the air and let them say Merry Christmas to whomever they wanted.That was cool

Last year on 12-22-07 Doug Moreland asked me to bring my collection in at 107.9
and have fun..I opened up the phones and did Radio Christmas Cards for 6-7 hours..The phones rang off the hook and it was alot of fun..It was great therapy for me because my Dad had died a couple of weeks earlier and I was still reeling from that..I had a blast and that once again proved to me the power that radio still has to connect one on one with people if allowed to do so...If you show them
you want them to be involved they'll involve themselves....A couple of people brought doughnuts and baked stuff to the station..It made it feel like Christmas to me at a time where I wasn't sure if I could get in the spirit...

ALLEN
 
Back in the mid 90's in my single days, the station where I was working gave the full timers the choice of being off either Christmas day or New Year's day. My family generally got together the weekend before or after Christmas, so I always took the 6-noon Christmas day shift. Most of the time, I was jocking a New Year's Eve party so having New Year's day off was perfect...sleep until football, then sleep some more. There was a Chinese restaurant not far from where I lived that did all you could eat buffet's for lunch and dinner. (the only restaurant open in that town on Christmas day) The lunch buffet ended at 3:00 and the dinner buffet started at 4. The lunch buffet was a dollar cheaper than the dinner buffet, so I would go in right at 3 and get the lunch buffet...(and Allen and Double J, you know me)... I ate into the dinner buffet! Saved a buck, ate enough for lunch and dinner, then went home and crashed. Most of my best memories involve food. ;D
 
I remember a couple of Christmas morning shifts while working for WYYD/WKIX in Raleigh. Played Christmas morning requests and put callers on the air!

We did the "oh, you forgot the batteries" giveaway with Eveready. What a thrill it was to see the look on faces of kids who we gave a set of d-cells for their remote control car - or double-As for the latest talking doll!
 
That's neat XTalker...The best memories for me involve the callers and the music.Maybe in some small way we made someone's Christmas a little better.
There was just a different feel about radio around Christmas...All the all Christmas
stations for 30 days plus takes away some of that magic to me...I would have thought it was a great idea 15-20 years ago but now its overkill...

Allen
 
I also remember a Christmas when working at WGNI when we got the staff togther at Jay Howard's studio and did our own version of Dicken's "A Christsmas Carol". Would sure love to have a tape of that!! Jeffrey Griffin put one together for WSJS a couple of years ago.
 
Xtalker, This is not about Christmas, but Remember "Dinner on the Mayflower"? Or the house we gave away?
 
You don't hear the great Christmas shows like you used to on the radio...Christmas At Our House..An Original Christmas.. etc...I've got several AC & Country Christmas shows that I begged for or pulled out of the trash.. Christmas At Our House was a staple on WRAL-FM for many years and is still the best one ever in my opinion..I would love to have one of those..So many of my greatest Christmas memories involve radio,driving home to the family after a shift..Helping a needy family out with a tree and gifts from WGHB and WRQR..As employees we used to get a tree as part of a trade...I always thought that was cool...Some of the best things stations ever did involve Christmas and now that I have kids I want the radio to be a special part of Christmas to them too...

Allen
 
Christmas At Our House was the best Christmas show. I too wish I had all of it on tape. It gave so much info on Christmases all over the world and the different traditions each country had. I've always loved Christmas and the warm feeling with everyone together. I remember one Christmas while I was working at the station (back in 1986 or 87 at WEED) when a good friend of mine came up from Dallas TX (that was where she was living at the time) and visited me at the station for a while and after she left I played "Somewhere out there" for her and she called me back and said that was sweet of me. The stations that play all Christmas music even now before Thanksgiving is way too much for me. It takes some of the "magic" out of the holiday. The last few years everyone refers to it as "Happy Holidays" but I still say Merry Christmas. Our company and GM says for us to refer to it as such on the air and I am glad too. However you may feel about religion it still represnts the birth of Jesus and should be celebrated not shunned just to appease the non Christians. It has been celevrated for 2000 years and should NOT be stopped just because someone feels "offended" by it. If they don't want to celebrate it that's fine, but don't make me have to give up my right to celebrate it.
 
RFGuy said:
Xtalker, This is not about Christmas, but Remember "Dinner on the Mayflower"? Or the house we gave away?
Click to expand...

Dinner on the Mayflower was a great promotion! For those who don't, WYYD did a big promotion to give away "Thanksgiving on the Mayflower". A pretty upscale couple won and our on-air staff served a full turkey dinner for 20 on a Mayflower moving van parked in their front yard. I have some photos. I recall we had the floors polished and the table was set with silverware and white linen tablecloths.
 
Let's see, hmmm, great radio Christmas memories....Oh, almost forgot. Actually, it's taken me 28 years to forget...the time I was working 7p-12mid at WCOS-AM in Columbia, SC a couple of days before Christmas. The midnight guy didn't show up, so I called the PD/AM Drive guy Hunter Herring and let him know. I was young and hungry and still excited as all get out to be in radio, so I told, no BEGGED Hunter to let me work thru until he came in at 6 am. Well, it started snowing at around 2 am...and snowing...and snowing...and snowing. Those of you who are familiar with Columbia and the Midlands of South Carolina know that it very rarely snows and certainly never 10 freaking inches....no matter what time of year it is. Well, it did snow 10 inches that night. And it didn't dawn on me until about 5:30 am that Hunter wouldn't we able to make it in at 6 am...so I worked until 10 am...when I got a call from the midday guy, Dave Douglas(who I think still works for the Braves Radio network these days), telling me that he was snowed in, too. He didn't make it in until 1 pm. So, let's do the math. 7-12, 12-6, 6-10, 10-1. 18 solid hours of Christmas music. Did I mention it was all live-assist? No sweepers and no jingles except for the top of the hour. To this day, I break out in hives whenever I hear Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Little Drummer Boy.
Oh yeah, since I was a student at USC and lived in the dorms and the dorms were closed for Christmas break...I had to drive all the way to my home in Hartsville, SC (only three hours in the snow) before I went to bed.

Brutal. I've never begged to work a shift since then. Ever. At all.

...but I'm not bitter.

...much.

No one ever saw the midnight guy ever again, either. One day I'll tell everyone where I buried him.
 
I remember that damned house! “A beautiful Americraft Home, with wall to wall carpet and flooring from Terry's Floor Fashions, glamorous lighting from "House Of Lights", select furniture from Wayside Furniture House, plumbing and accessories from Murray Supply, toilet paper from Tom’s Toilet Paper Palace, Lawn Fertilizer from Eddies Excrement Emporium.” All said while wearing “A Wyyd Smile”! ;D
 
The most Christmas music I ever played was 12 hours at WGHB in 1990..In August of 1990 I did 14 hours of Elvis on WRMT..The PD called me told me to bring my Elvis collection and they would pay me to do music,trivia etc... At that time my collection 80/20 LP's to CD's..I wasn't even working for the station at the time..I was working full time at WGHB and Part time at WRQR..I took a vacation day at WGHB to do the WRMT thing..While I was there Rob Lynn asked if I wanted to do some part time with WSAY...So from 1990-1992 I juggled 3 different radio jobs with 3 differnt formats in 3 different cities all the while still being Allen Vick on all three stations.I was 23 at the time and had a blast. Its hard to believe that was 18 years ago.Great memories...Wow how the biz has changed...I put some miles on my 88 Pontiac for a couple of years...I'd love to do another 12 hours of Christmas music this year...



Allen
 
MaxGM said:
I remember that damned house! “A beautiful Americraft Home, with wall to wall carpet and flooring from Terry's Floor Fashions, glamorous lighting from "House Of Lights", select furniture from Wayside Furniture House, plumbing and accessories from Murray Supply, toilet paper from Tom’s Toilet Paper Palace, Lawn Fertilizer from Eddies Excrement Emporium.” All said while wearing “A Wyyd Smile”! ;D
Click to expand...

And all the remotes we did to get the 96 finalists. It was a good promotion (ie: made money). I remember the engineers rigging a cart to go off in the sound system when the door actually opened! Good thing the rules said "first person to open the door, wins the house".
 
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