Those looking for some regional holiday traditions without leaving the comfort of home can easily find them with a flick of a switch.
Broadcast and digital technology and cultural innovation have developed hand and hand to allow one to celebrate with anything that can present a live audio or video stream — including two live holiday radio marathons from Princeton University’s 103.3 WPRB radio station
First up is Jon Solomon’s 25-hour Christmas Day marathon — a regional holiday tradition since 1988.
As one of our CNS reporters noted, Solomon was hosting a 10 p.m.-til-morning slot that just happened to be on Christmas Eve and came across an empty shift sign-up sheet after most of the station’s student hosts had gone home for winter break.
“Solomon, who is Jewish, didn’t have any plans, so he took the slot and played nothing but Christmas music until the morning. Twelve-ish hours became 24 hours the next year. He added an extra hour to the show to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2014, and that has stuck since then.”
Solomon readily says the content of his marathon continues to mutate and can include everything and anything from a 42-minute version of “Little Drummer Boy,” a block of Ramones-style Christmas songs, and the 45-minute “Snaildartha: The Story of Jerry the Christmas Snail — A Soul Jazz Extravaganza.”
“It’s always very important to me that the program not kind of rest on its laurels from year to year,” Solomon, a Princeton native, says in the interview. “I know people don’t always listen at the same point or at the same time. I want to make sure there’s an infusion of as much new material as possible every year.”
That includes new pieces he finds through blogs, SoundCloud, listeners, and friends. He also puts out calls asking for recordings of holiday stories from friends, family, musicians, comedians, and others to be played on the show — with some becoming traditional favorites. And when in doubt, he invites the family to participate, as his wife, Nicole, and their daughter, Maggie, do annually.
And generally Solomon says he has to be prepared to improvise, as when in 2006 James Brown died during Solomon’s Christmas Day broadcast and inspired the marathon host to pull out every James Brown Christmas song in his collection and play a block.
The fun with Solomon starts on Friday, December 24, at 5 p.m.
Then listen up when long time radio host and pianist Marvin Rosen brings his annual 24-hour holiday season marathon of new music — “Viva 21st Century” — to the WPRB Radio airwaves and internet on Thursday and Friday, December 30 and 31.
Rosen first went on the air in 1997. The university’s academic year was winding down, students were leaving, and WPRB needed on-air hosts/DJs to cover the summer shifts.
As U.S. 1 writer Susan Van Dongen reports in a profile, “The bottom line with Marvin Rosen is that he really, really loves music and wants to share it, especially new music from little-known composers in far-flung regions of the world.
As Rosen himself says, “Every week I’m playing mostly 21st-century classical music, and playing it from places where people may not even know that classical music is being created. The more I do this, the more I think, ‘why aren’t these musicians and composers more well-known? Composers are writing in so many styles, too — it’s endless. But you have to have the desire to listen.”
“If I get a new recording from a composer I’ve never heard of, from an obscure country, I think to myself, ‘this will be on the show next week,’” Rosen says. “That’s why having my show on WPRB is priceless. This is my joy.”
Born in Englewood in May, 1953, then raised in Kendall Park and Princeton, Rosen first discovered the joy of radio and music in 1962 when he got a transistor radio, tuning into pop music giant WABC in New York.
Rosen says buying records became an obsession, and he spent afternoons and a good chuck of his paychecks buying records in the Princeton University Store.
That grew into an interest in 20th century Post War avant-garde and desire to study music — obtaining a BA from Trenton State College, an MA from Manhattan School of Music, and doctorate in music education from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He has been a full-time member of the piano faculty at Westminster Conservatory of Music in Princeton since 1999.
“The diversity of styles is limitless in the work of our living composers,” says Rosen. “Many of them will be influenced by rock, hip hop, jazz, electronic music. There is a lot of avant-garde and a lot of composers writing middle-of-the-road music — elements of everything.”
He says he is also finding a growing audience of young listeners. “The music of today speaks to young people because the influences are so vast. It comes from the music they’re familiar with if they’re from another ethnic background. And it is all coming from their lifetimes. It is their experience. That’s the main thing.”
The “Viva 21st Century” music marathon begins Thursday, December 30, at 10 a.m.
While both Solomon and Rosen’s may seem extreme and offbeat, they’re actually something of the spirit of WPRB which was started not by a university-driven agenda but by a student who created a signal from a makeshift studio at the university and created in the words of a university radio historian “a sanctuary for the imagination.”
For more on WPRB, visit www.wprb.com.
In addition to the area’s annual holiday radio programs, there is also a regional television tradition that has been warming the eyes off and on for 55-years: WPIX’s The Yule Log.
The televised image of a burning log in a fireplace hit the airwaves on Saturday, December 24, 1966, at 9:30 a.m. and glowed on through the night.
It now glows for a few hours on Christmas morning.
The Yule Log was the brainchild of Fred Thrower, the former television ad executive who eventually became the president of WPIX.
He came up with the idea when he had to fill three hours of empty airtime on the Christmas Eve schedule.
A chance viewing of a Coca-Cola commercial with Santa and a fireplace inspired him to create a simple video loop of a crackling fire with music and broadcast it with no commercial interruptions.
As strange as the idea was (and still is), the television turned fireplace — without the heat, scent, or glow — became, in the words of an NPR commentator, “one of the most widely recognized holiday television programs.”
The Yule Log nearly was extinguished in the 1990s when ratings dropped and WPIX cancelled it.
However, executives decided to bring it back after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, and its ratings rebounded to the millions.
As NPR noted years later, “There’s something very special about the fact that you’re watching the same burning fireplace that someone else is. I think it was a statement beyond just a burning fireplace on TV, of us being a connected society.”
Since the tradition of watching the Yule Log had become part of people’s lives, it was inevitable that someone would use new technologies to recreate the DVD version of the video hearth to warm up one’s computer and their own wallets.
Nevertheless, according to TheYuleLog.com, “That famous and glorious 7-minute film loop of that roaring, happy, mesmerizing fire inside that festively decorated mantelpiece complemented by the majesty of some of the greatest classic Christmas music ever recorded is indeed the one and only WPIX Yule Log. It has often been imitated, but never duplicated.”
The WPIX Yule Log is scheduled for Christmas Day, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. For more information, go to www.pix11.com/about-us/tv-listing.
