Prepping for Another Year of Christmas Cult Classics at WPRB

Back in 1988, Jon Solomon was a 15-year-old living in the Princeton area and dreaming of becoming a radio DJ. In those days before YouTube and home recording studios, he cold-called the manager of Princeton University’s student-run station, WPRB, to see if he could work some shifts. The manager told him he could have any shifts that no Princeton student wanted. So that fall, Solomon began broadcasting on the 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. slot. His parents would pick him up when it was over, after sunrise.

Solomon’s big break came at Christmas. The student hosts generally left for the holiday, creating a big hole in the schedule. With the station’s blessing, Solomon hosted a marathon of Christmas music.

Almost four decades later, he is still at it.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2023, Solomon — whose day job is as WPRB’s operations manager — hosted his signature 25-hour marathon for the 35th time in 36 years. And in 2024, he plans to do it again, from home and without any naps.

Solomon has been passionate for many years about Princeton basketball, writing about the team at PrincetonBasketball.com from 2004 to 2013 and has co-hosted the Ivy League Hoops Hour podcast. But Solomon, an honorary member of the Class of 1976, has become best known for his efforts curating Christmas music.

He says he’s aware of a few other DJs across the country who broadcast Christmas music marathons, but few are as lengthy; Solomon’s marathon has topped out at 30 hours in a stretch. The one year Solomon didn’t do the marathon — in 1995, when he was driving to see his alma mater, Northwestern, play in the Rose Bowl — ended up solidifying his commitment. “Not doing it reminded me how important the marathon was to me,” Solomon says.

Don’t expect to hear familiar Christmas standards on Solomon’s show; it’s a cornucopia of musical obscurities, plus items that aren’t music at all. Typically, Solomon’s Christmas show is about 30% indie rock, 20% soul and funk, 15% oddities, 15% spoken word, and 20% what Solomon characterizes as “miscellaneous.”

“The best radio to me is when you never know what’s coming next, but the songs make sense adjacent to each other,” Solomon says. “I like to drop songs on people’s heads that they’re not expecting.”

In one typical segment that aired from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve 2023, Solomon played cuts as varied as “(I hate)CHRISTMAS RECORDS!,” from an EP by the British post-punk band Comet Gain; a song from Ruth Harley’s “Santa’s Funk & Soul Christmas Party, Vol. 4”; a meditation by comedian Joe Pera on choosing a Christmas tree; a mash-up between AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree”; and the song “Merry Christmas From Jail” by a band called the Williams.

Asked for a more “mainstream” example from his 2023 playlist, Solomon offered the late Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor’s “Silent Night” — but even that was her comparatively obscure “long version.”

Surprisingly, Solomon says he is broadcasting more fresh material during the marathon now than he ever has before. Of the 25 hours in his 2023 show, about 15 hours — nearly two-thirds — were new to the show, he says.

“Airing stuff I haven’t played before keeps the show interesting for me and the people who pay attention year after year,” Solomon says. “Some people have told me they’ve been listening since year one or two, which is kind of bonkers.”

At first, Solomon needed to rely on WPRB’s library and his own limited collection of Christmas songs to make the marathon work. But then the show took on a life of its own.

Bands both famous and obscure produce new Christmas music every year, usually accessible on sites like YouTube and Bandcamp. But even more than that, Solomon has created an ecosystem in which new music flows his way from a nationwide brigade of Christmas music aficionados.

“The community of people who collect Christmas music are unlike any other gatekeeper community — they’re so willing to share,” Solomon says. “There are more than a few songs about the marathon now too, which is wild.”

In 2023, Solomon says, the number of listener submissions was the most he’d ever received — so many that he couldn’t come close to airing them all during the marathon. He gives every song he receives a rating of one to five stars and only considers the five-star ratings for the marathon. But even his five-star file has far too many items for a 25-hour show.

One musician in Vancouver, Joel RL Phelps, has contributed at least one new song to Solomon’s show for the past 12 years. In recent years, Solomon has been devoting a whole segment to him. “It’s a meaningful portion of the marathon for me emotionally, because this is music that has not been released and that you can’t just hear anywhere,” Solomon says.

Another musician, Neal Markowski of Chicago, took it upon himself to record Christmas versions of all the songs on Hex Enduction Hour, a 1982 album by the British post-punk band The Fall that is one of Solomon’s favorites.

“It’s a pretty out-there idea, but it made total sense if you know the show,” Solomon says. “I’m just lucky to have that guy in my corner.”

Sometimes, a new song for the show isn’t new at all, but rather rediscovered. As the 2023 show was airing, a listener sent Solomon “Happy Birthday Jesus,” a 1971 track by an artist named Samuel Sweetsinger Bell. Solomon hadn’t heard it before, but it “checked all the boxes. I hadn’t played it before, Bell was from Philly, which is in the WPRB listening area, and it’s amazing.” “Happy Birthday Jesus” now has an inside track to make it into Solomon’s 2024 show.

Solomon also relies on his own collection, which has grown astronomically since his teenage years. In addition to a computer filled with digital music files, “I end up schlepping like 10 to 14 boxes of CDs and LPs up from the basement” to prep the show, Solomon says.

“The community of people who collect Christmas music are unlike any other gatekeeper community — they’re so willing to share.”

— Jon Solomon

For the last 11 years, Solomon has added a Hanukkah show to his repertoire, though he says it’s more challenging because there’s “a lot less material.” For the Hanukkah show, Solomon has gone as long as six hours, but says three hours works best.

To prepare for the Christmas show, Solomon gathers songs all year, but the process accelerates during the two weeks before Christmas. It’s a stressful period, he says, requiring him to whittle down a massive amount of music and make sure all the pieces fit together coherently.

One of the most positive changes, Solomon says, has been the shift toward broadcasting from home, which began with the coronavirus pandemic. Doing the marathon for the first time from home in 2020 was “emotional,” he says: His wife and daughter could be involved, and he could better experience the passing of time, which had been difficult in WPRB’s windowless studios in Holder Hall and Bloomberg Hall. “It’s hard to imagine going back now,” he says.

The 2023 marathon became especially meaningful for Solomon when his daughter Maggie — now the same age as Solomon was when he did his first marathon — took a significant role, playing a segment of reindeer songs she dubbed “Maggie’s Reindeer Rumble.”

Solomon expects Maggie to continue to have a role in the 2024 marathon, joining other features that have become yearly standards. Solomon always starts and ends the marathon with tracks from the 1965 album Merry Christmas from the Sonics, the Wailers & the Galaxies, a Pacific Northwest garage-band compendium that he loves.

A live chat during the show (and, in earlier years, the request line and emails from listeners) has helped Solomon gauge what’s resonating with his audience. Positive feedback convinced Solomon to play two 40-minute back-to-back segments annually. One he started airing in 2004 is Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail, a spoken-word-jazz reinterpretation of Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha, focused on, yes, a snail. The other is an extended version of “The Little Drummer Boy” by a Norwegian musician named Lindstrøm.

During the year, listeners will send Solomon snail ornaments for his Christmas tree or ask him to autograph a snail for them and send it back. The tradition “wasn’t planned — it just kind of happened,” Solomon says. But now, he says, “it wouldn’t be Christmas for a lot of listeners, and I want to honor that.”

Solomon also makes a point of scheduling special segments at particular times, such as 12:34 a.m. on Christmas day, which he sees as numerically resonant. Last year, Solomon played a block of Christmas songs either performed by the Ramones or inspired by them. He’s also assembled segments inspired by the British bands Joy Division and New Order. “I did that for the first time last year and the immediate response was, ‘You have to do this again,’” Solomon says.

This year, Solomon will be including a live performance of holiday songs by the musician Advance Base.

The interplay with his fans helps keep him going, he says.

“There are people who say, ‘I used to listen to this show when I was 8 with my dad, and now it’s my show,’” Solomon says. “It’s become a part of people’s lives beyond mine.”