Working the Christmas/New years shift -whats your experience

[Tape Splicer]

CJVB's multilingual/multicultural block programming made for an interesting mix of languages and program styles. especially at Christmas.
Our Finnish producer claimed that Finland was the real home of Santa's Rain Deer.
Each producer was offered blocks of time from 15 min to 1 or 2 hours as special rates.
The ethnic shows spoke the language and featured the music and customs of each country.
On many Christmas Eve's I recall operating the live remote from St. George's Greek Orthodox Church. this Christmas service starting at midnight. On other occasions I ran the mid day block of Christmas special shows as well as doing a two to three hour air shift. The music was from around the world... a very cosmopolitan Christmas.
On one Christmas morning Mr. VB operated the AM shift which featured a live international broadcast featuring a live church remote from the Fraser Valley shared with a live remote church broadcast from the Netherlands. Mr VB was cross fading from one church location to the other. Both church services were in Dutch.
Very different from the main stream "Grandma god run over by a Rain Deer" or "Holly Jolly Christmas" It was a great deal of fun.

[isthisthingon]

what is a Rain Deer?

[Tape Splicer]

(spelling changed) The Reindeer is a medium-sized member of the deer family from Scandanavia.

[Mike Cleaver]

My first "paid" radio shift was Christmas Eve in 1961 at CKOV in Kelowna.
All of the programming was on tape, 15 minute sponsored shows, recorded the previous week, sold to various sponsors featuring specific artists performing Christmas music.
We had three Ampex 351's, two mounted in racks in the control room and the third in a roll-around in the production studio.
It was brought into the control room for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day so the shows could run back to back or with a taped spot from a commercial reel in between.
Christmas Day was more of the same, taped shows from sign on at 6am until sign off at midnight.
Worked many Christmas Eves and Christmas Days over the years, being single and letting the guys and gals with families have those days off.
Most stations played Christmas Music and features, either with operators and announcers or taped and a few newscasts thrown in at 8am. noon, and 6pm.

[freqfreak2]

New Year's Eve ... 1973/1974, CHQT Edmonton.

The whole evening was voice-tracked. Lots of Guy Lombardo and Frank Chacksfield. Was basically there just to roll the tapes and op for the news guy.

It was my first New Year's Eve in radio. Hell, it was my first New Year's Eve working anywhere and also the first since I turned legal age.

Anyways, I help the news guy tape the 9, 10, and 11 o'clock casts in advance before he ran a quick errand out of the building.

Being green, I didn't ask too many questions. The newsman wasn't green, and it wasn't his first New Year's Eve.

Then news guy came back with a brown bag containing two warm six-packs of MacEwans Scotch Ale. QT was two doors down on 103rd Street from the then-government run vendors. Looking back, I'm surprised they even carried UK imports.

My favourite under-age brew at the time was Heidelberg. What did I know - I liked the shape of the bottle.

After a few sips of MacEwans, I realised what beer should really taste like. After a few bottles, I was bombed.

For QT listeners, 1974 rolled in at about 12:04 (or so I like to remember). For us, the night ended outside on the street - vowing to remain the best of friends forever.

I was always puzzled why I got so sloshed that night. Years later, I found out MacEwans was an 8% beer.

The news guy drifted to the CBC. I too drifted to the public sector. We lost touch.

But to this day, New Year's Eve is MacEwans Eve. Thanks, Len, for the memory.

[Neumann Sennheiser]

...and thanks for the memory of drinking MacEwans in the 70's; I especially enjoyed the dark ale. I don't know if it's even around anymore, at least in the BCLCB stores I mean, but I recall being in line one time around 1974, buying a six pack, and the older gentleman in line behind me commenting that he could not believe anyone would pay a dollar a bottle for beer!

[jon]

Then news guy came back with a brown bag containing two warm six-packs of MacEwans Scotch Ale. QT was two doors down on 103rd Street from the then-government run vendors. Looking back, I'm surprised they even carried UK imports.

I'm not sure if they had built it yet, but the ALCB Specialty Liquor Store was only 3 blocks away, on 106 Street, becoming an A&B Sound after retailing was privatized. Maybe that is where he went for the Imports.

I worked New Years Eve at CHQM-AM in the early 1970s, but nothing eventful happened. A former operator and his wife had dropped by a few days earlier, and she promised to phone the station on New Years Eve because she was scheduled to work as a BC TEL long distance operator that night. But she didn't.

Christmas that year was more interesting. I was the first operator in the building Christmas morning at 6:55 am (first bus out of South Burnaby got me there then). I managed to rescue the poor soul who got stuck doing the morning show live on CHQM-AM when Brad Keene wouldn't do it. He was still sober enough to sound fine on air but too drunk to cue a record. Stealing it from the Production control room, I replaced one $35 needle that was broken and straightened the other. There was hell to pay over the $35, but I came out the hero of the piece, not the whipping boy. Since joining the station 6 months earlier, they had replaced all the Electra 888s with Shure SuperTrack Type III, with replacement needles running $35 a pop at station pricing.

Operating was more fun than usual that day and Boxing Day, as there were no commercials on Christmas Day, and the music was seriously "under scheduled", giving me a chance to add some of my own from the record library. I even "jumped" the end of Christmas music on Boxing Day at 6pm when I realized that the music on CHQM-FM was short for the 5-6pm hour exactly the length of Quincy Jones' version of "What's Going On". Hey, how can Peace not be a Christmas theme?

My worst holiday radio experience was on Hallowe'en, my first shift on SFU's campus station, but that's a topic for another season.

[freqfreak2]

Neumann: MacEwans is still occasionally available at better beer stores (at least here in Edmonton). However, their distribution has been spotty in 2011.

Managed to find two similar ales:
- Pike Kilt Lifter, from the folks at Pike Brewing in Seattle (6.5%)
- Porter, from Okanagan Spring Brewery in Vernon, B.C. (a foot-stomping 8.5%)

Jon: today the liquor store on 103rd is a provincial government office but still carries the name the store had: Beaver House (check the street view at http://bit.ly/vZL2N9).
CHQT was in the building at left where the business condo sign is (new facade has been added). And you can see it was possible to whip from the control room (second floor, near the back) to the vendors and back before a really long version of Ravel's Bolero had finished.

[Mike Cleaver]

New Year's Eve back in the early sixties was another one of my regular gigs, probably because I was too young to drink legally.
The fun at CKOV in Kelowna usually started around 10pm when "Mother" Browne (JWB Browne's widow) would come into the station and start going through the big cupboards along the back wall of Studio A, the orchestra sized main studio and start selecting the 78's that she wanted to play that evening.
She'd sit in the little Studio B off to the left of the main control room and do her show, with many guests (some of Kelowna's most prominent citizens) dropping in and used the talkback system, telling me what disks she wanted to play.
I was in the control room, running the disks and putting her phone calls on the air.
You had to flip the needles around on the GE cartridges on the 3 turntables to play the 78's, something the station had stopped doing on a regular basis years before.
The needle on the other side was for 45's and 33 1/3 disks.
It was a lot of fun as I recall some gin always was involved and lots of people coming by, many of them who'd already had their heads in the pail for some time.
This could go on until 2 or 3 in the morning.
Some of the stories were fabulous and the music was mostly stuff from the '30s and '40s.
I really missed those evenings when she finally stopped doing them a few years later.

[J Kendrick]

Having to invent Santa Claus stories for newscasts on Christmas Eve... in the years before N.O.R.A.D. decided to take on the task. If you didn't... the news room phone would ring off the hook from irate parents grumbling that their kids wouldn't go to bed until they heard it on the news...