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2024 Schedule

6/24/2024

I'm posting this on Leon Day, and I'd like to wish a very Happy Leon Day to all who celebrate!

For those who don’t know, Leon Day is June 25th. That date marks the turning point, six months from Christmas Day! It's the point on the calendar when the Christmas Yet To Come is now closer than the most recent Christmas Past.

Oh, and Leon is Noel spelled backwards.

While the exact origin of Leon Day doesn’t seem to be known, it is closely tied into Christmas In July, which I covered on a podcast episode a couple years ago (which you can find HERE if you'd like some of the history behind that).

I thought I would use Leon Day as a day to officially announce the schedule for the Sounds of Christmas through the end of the year. Or, at least, SOME of the schedule.

On July 1st, I’ll kick off the Sounds of Christmas from A to Z. Starting at 6am Eastern, I’ll be playing almost every song in our library in alphabetical order by title.

That will be immediately followed by the Sounds of Christmas from A to Z - The Artists’ Edition, where I’ll be playing almost every artist in our library in alphabetical order.

Following that, on a date to be determined (probably in or around the middle of August), I’ll have a special 200th episode of the Sounds of Christmas podcast. Details on that are still being worked out, so stand by for that.

And just so you know, the latest episode (also out today) is episode number 196. So there’s still a little way to go.

Shortly after that, the Sounds of Christmas will become the Sounds of Halloween! On October 1st, we’ll switch to Halloween music, and that will continue for the entire month, all the way through Halloween night!

And then, on November 1st, the new season of the Sounds of Christmas will begin - featuring the Best Variety of Christmas music, including hundreds of brand new songs, many of which are still being recorded, mixed and otherwise prepared for the upcoming season!

There are also a couple of special shows in the works for December, including a tribute to the Christmas music of Saturday Night Live as well as a special dedicated to Christmas music from the 1980s!

I have a bunch of artist interviews already lined up for this fall on the Sounds of Christmas podcast, but I’m going to hold off on dropping any names until those are recorded and ready to go. Tech issues and scheduling conflicts happen. But I’ll do my best to bring on people who love Christmas and Christmas music...almost as much as I do!

Is that everything that’s happening on the Sounds of Christmas station and podcast? No, of course not. But I don’t want to spoil everything, so I just hope this is enough to entice you to stick around (or come back).

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The Return of the Sounds of Christmas From A To Z

6/17/2024

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We’re just over halfway through June as I’m posting this, which means July is just a couple weeks away. And for many Christmas podcasters (and Christmas peeps in general), that means Christmas In July!

Last year, I did something on the Sounds of Christmas I hadn’t done since I launched the station in 2007 - I played nearly every song in our library in alphabetical order.

I have added hundreds of songs since then, so I thought I’d revisit that this year.

Starting on July 1st, at 6am Eastern, I’ll be giving you the Sounds of Christmas from A to Z, playing almost every song in our library in alphabetical order by song title. And, at this point, I honestly have no idea how long it will go on. I can tell you that it takes over 15 hours just to get through all the songs that start with A (which is two hours longer than last year).

So, a couple things about this.

First, I began the organization of this by taking my master library list and putting it into a Google spreadsheet, then I set it to alphabetize all the entries by song title. For the most part, I think this worked okay. In some instances, punctuation in the song titles made it tricky. Sometimes, I was able to move those songs around where they made the most sense, but that probably wasn’t always the case. So you may hear a song that seems out of place, and that could be the reason.

Or it could be other things. Sometimes artists change the name of a song they’re covering. "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" becomes, simply, "A Merry Little Christmas". "My Grown Up Christmas List" becomes just "Grown Up Christmas List". And "Run Rudolph Run" is sometimes listed as "Run Run Rudolph". I’m sure there are plenty of others, but those are the ones that leap to mind.

I tried to deal with that as best I could, but this was a huge undertaking, and there may have been some I missed. Another reason that, upon occasion, there may be a song that seems out of place.

Also, I’m not playing every different version of every single song. I did consider that in the beginning last year, and thought it might be interesting to hear so many different artists with their own interpretations of each song. Then I realized that, if I did that, there would be over nine hours of different versions of “Silver Bells”.

I like “Silver Bells. A lot. Maybe even more than most. But I don’t think even I would listen to nine hours of it.

So I went through and picked one version of songs like that, to kind of represent the song. A couple times, when I had some versions of a particular song that were so different from each other, almost like they were completely different songs, I chose to play more than one. And sometimes I play an instrumental along with a vocal version of the same song. I tried not to play two versions of the same song that sounded very similar. But there were a couple times I found it hard to choose, so I included both.

I didn’t include Chanukah or New Years songs, or Thanksgiving or Halloween songs. However, Christmas songs that also include elements of Chanukah, New Years, Thanksgiving and Halloween are part of the A to Z event.

For songs that started with numbers, I simply spelled out the numbers, and you’ll find them accordingly. I also took out a lot of the "the"’s, "an"'s and "a"’s that started a song title. But not all. I made a lot of judgment calls on that, taking away the ones I thought were unnecessary, while leaving others I thought were important. Like “The Christmas Song”. That’s how everyone refers to it, not just “Christmas Song”, so that “the” stayed. You get the idea.

I included lots of medleys, even though some of the songs included in those will be found elsewhere in the entire A to Z event. I went back and forth on this, and finally decided that medleys are quite possibly more popular in Christmas music than in any other genre, so excluding them just seemed wrong.

I may have made some mistakes with all of this. Once again, this was a much bigger undertaking than I thought it would be. So some songs might come up in the wrong place. Some songs might play more than once. And some might not show up at all. None of that is on purpose. Just human error. My apologies if there’s a song you want to hear and somehow you miss it or it doesn’t show up.

I also get that you may not agree with the choices I make as far as which version of a particular song gets played. In most cases, I picked the more obvious choice, but a couple times I shook things up a little to pick something you might not expect.

I know that this isn’t for everybody. When some people listen to Christmas music, they want Bing’s “White Christmas”. They want Nat King Cole and Elvis. For others it’s Mariah Carey and Kelly Clarkson. And while all of those artists do appear, more than once, in the Sounds of Christmas from A to Z, it will take a while to get to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”. And if you miss Mariah’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” on that first day, you won’t get to hear it again until we get back to regular programming.

But, if you love Christmas music, all kinds of Christmas music, I think you'll enjoy it. You’ll get a real taste of what I mean when I say the Sounds of Christmas plays the best variety of Christmas music. You’ll hear lots of songs you may never have heard before, and you’ll hear lots of artists that you may have never heard before, either. But I really think you’re going to like it (at least I hope you do)!

I’ll probably send periodic updates through social media to let you know where we are as the month of July rolls on (and possibly August).

I’m set to kick this off on July 1st with Faith Hill’s “A Baby Changes Everything”, and then keep on going until at some point we get to “Zuzu’s Petals” by the group Lunch At Allen’s. It seems like it took a couple weeks to do this last year, and there are more songs this time around, so it should take a little longer, but since I’m still programming it all, I really don’t know. I guess we’ll find out together.

And lastly, I started this post off, mentioning that I’ve added hundreds of songs since I did this last year. Those weren’t all just new songs from 2023. There were lots of older releases that came back into print, or were finally released for the first time (or in a slightly different configuration). So I also added a lot of songs that hadn’t been available for a long time (and in some cases, songs that had never been released in the first place).

Anyway, despite all the caveats and possible mistakes, I hope the whole thing is fun, and that, if you do tune in, you like what you hear.

Thanks so much, and may you always believe in Santa Claus!

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2024 Schedule

The Return of the Sounds of Christmas From A To Z

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